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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

                                                                                                       --Jim Corbett  1933-2001