Charter 77

Czechoslovak human rights movement founded 1977 to lobby for Czech conformity to the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

It is named after the 1977 human-rights manifesto signed by over 700 intellectuals and former party officials in response to the 1975 Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE, from 1994 the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, OSCE). The manifesto prompted a renewed crackdown on dissidents by the communist government and Charter 77 was forced to operate largely as an underground movement, although it was widely recognized internationally as the leading Czech dissident group. Charter 77 remained active throughout the 1980s and played a key part in the largely peaceful overthrow of the communist regime 1989-90. The first president of Czechoslovakia following the ‘velvet revolution’, Václav Havel,was a Charter 77 activist.