Vaclav Havel: R.I.P.

Motivated in part by the arrest of members of the psychedelic band Plastic People of the Universe, the text of Charter 77 was prepared in 1976. In December 1976, the first signatures were collected.^[2] The charter was published on 6 January 1977, along with the names of the first 242 signatories, which represented various occupations, political viewpoints, and religions. Although Václav Havel, Ludvík Vaculík and Pavel Landovský were detained while trying to bring the charter to the Federal Assembly and the Czechoslovak government and the original document was confiscated,^[3] copies circulated as samizdat and on 7 January were published in several western newspapers (including Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The Times or New York Times) and transmitted to Czechoslovakia by Czechoslovak-banned radio broadcasters like Radio Free Europe or Voice of America.

Charter 77 criticized the government for failing to implement human rights provisions of a number of documents it had signed, including the 1960 Constitution of Czechoslovakia, the Final Act of the 1975 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (Basket III of the Helsinki Accords), and United Nations covenants on political, civil, economic, and cultural rights. The document also described the signatories as a “loose, informal, and open association of people . . . united by the will to strive individually and collectively for respect for human and civil rights in our country and throughout the world.” It emphasized that Charter 77 is not an organization, has no statutes or permanent organs, and “does not form the basis for any oppositional political activity.” This final stipulation was a careful effort to stay within the bounds of Czechoslovak law, which made organized opposition illegal.

After 30 years, many of those from both Czechoslovakia and the UK who were personally involved in the Charter 77 movement and helped to gain international support and to draw attention to the petition gathered on 29 March 2007 at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, London, to look back and share their experience and memories of one of the little known but most significant events of modern European history.

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