Harare Declaration

The Harare Commonwealth Declaration was a declaration of the Commonwealth of Nations, setting out the Commonwealth's core principles and values, detailing the Commonwealth's membership criteria, and redefining and reinforcing its purpose. The Declaration was issued in Harare, Zimbabwe, on 20 October 1991, during the twelfth Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. It reaffirmed the political principles laid out in the Singapore Declaration of twenty years before, and (along with the Singapore Declaration) is considered one of the two most important documents to the Commonwealth's uncodified constitution, until the adoption of the Charter of the Commonwealth in 2012. The Singapore Declaration had committed the Commonwealth to several principles in 1971: world peace and support for the United Nations; individual liberty and egalitarianism; opposition to racism; opposition to colonialism; the eradication of poverty, ignorance, disease, and economic inequality; free trade; institutional co-operation; multilateralism; and the rejection of international coercion. The Harare Declaration reaffirmed all these except the last.