Valclav Havel writes in the Wall Street Journal:
In January 1977, a group of Czechoslovak citizens, of which I was privileged to be one, released Charter 77. That document was our call for the better protection of basic civil and political rights by the state. It was also the articulation of our belief that, as citizens, we had a certain responsibility to work with the Czechoslovak government to ensure through our vigilance that basic rights would be protected.
With the release of Charter 77, we wanted to create not a membership organization, but instead, as I wrote then, “a free, informal open community of people of different convictions, different faiths, and different professions united by the will to strive, individually and collectively, for the respect of civic and human rights in our own country and throughout the world.”
More than three decades later, in December 2008, a group of Chinese citizens has taken our modest effort as their model. They have made a similar call — for human rights, good governance and respect for the responsibility of citizens to keep watch over their government — to ensure that their state plays by the rules of a modern open society . . .
