A Declaration Adopted at a Founding Congress and Twice Revised

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.