Civil Initiative—our responsibility for protecting the persecuted must be balanced by our accountability to the legal order
- Civil initiative is nonviolent, truthful, wide-ranging, cooperative, pertinent, volunteer-based, and community centered.
- Nonviolence checks vigilantism. Civil initiative neither evades nor seizes police powers.
- Truthfulness. Civil initiative must be open and subject to public examination.
- Civil initiative is wide-ranging and not factional. It protects those whose rights are being violated, regardless of the victim’s ideological position or political usefulness.
- Civil initiative is cooperative. Dialogue with authorities must exist in an atmosphere of respect for government officials as persons and with an attitude of willingness to compromise.
- It is pertinent to protect victim’s needs and not succumb to reactions that are primarily symbolic or merely expressive. Media coverage and public opinion are of secondary importance; or central concern is to do justice rather than to petition others to do it.
- The community must never forfeit its duty to protect the victims of human rights violations. But it must be a volunteer-based effort; no new bureaucracy should be formed that would conflict with governmental functions of those constitutionally designated to assume responsibility.
- Civil initiative is community-centered. Our exercise of civil initiative must be integrated within the community and must outlast and out reach individuals acts of conscience