The Amsterdam Declaration States the Fundamental Principles of Humanism

The Amsterdam Declaration was adopted in 1952 at the founding congress of what is now Humanists International, chaired by the biologist Julian Huxley, and states the federation's fundamental principles: a commitment to reason and free inquiry over dogma and revelation, an ethics grounded in human experience and needs, and support for democracy, human rights and international cooperation. The primary text itself has been formally revised twice since 1952, in 2002 and again in 2022, the Oxford Handbook of Atheism noting that each revision kept the declaration's core commitments intact while updating its language and emphasis to address the humanist movement's changing sense of its own priorities across seven decades. Humanists International functions as the coordinating federation for humanist, atheist, rationalist, secularist and Ethical Culture organisations across many countries, and the declaration serves as the common reference point those otherwise independent national bodies can each point to as a shared statement of principle, functioning less as binding law over its member organisations than as the document establishing what counts as humanism for the purpose of federation membership in the first place.

Humanists International represents the movement at the United Nations and other international bodies, and its Freedom of Thought Report, an annual publication assessing discrimination against the non-religious in countries around the world, has become one of the federation's most visible ongoing activities, an application of the Amsterdam Declaration's human rights commitments to a specific, sustained documentary project rather than leaving the principle stated but unmonitored. The report's country assessments track laws criminalising blasphemy or apostasy, restrictions on the ability of humanist and atheist organisations to register or operate, and instances of violence or persecution directed at the non-religious, work the federation frames as extending the Amsterdam Declaration's stated principles into an accountability mechanism rather than leaving them as an unexamined statement of values. The Oxford Handbook of Atheism situates this reporting work within a broader shift in organised humanism's twentieth and twenty-first century activity, from primarily philosophical and educational societies toward bodies that also engage directly in human rights advocacy and international monitoring, a shift the federation's own founding congress, chaired by a scientist rather than a philosopher or theologian, arguably anticipated from the movement's earliest institutional moment.