Everything on VPTT gets measured against two standards. Not nine principles, not a long checklist — two. They’re broad on purpose, because they need to cover an enormous range of issues, from healthcare to housing to how a local zoning decision gets made. But broad doesn’t mean vague. Each one means something specific, and together they do different jobs.
Human Rights
Human rights are the floor. They’re the protections and basic dignity every person is entitled to — not something that has to be earned, not something a vote can take away, and not something that should depend on how much money or organization someone has behind them.
This isn’t a narrow legal checklist. It draws on the broad, internationally recognized understanding of human rights — the idea that people are entitled to dignity, liberty, equal treatment, freedom from violence and discrimination, and a real voice in the decisions that affect their lives. It also extends to the fuller aspiration behind that tradition: that people should be able to reach a decent standard of living, health, education, and security.
VPTT doesn’t start with a fixed answer for how those things get achieved. There are a lot of different ways a society can try to secure decent healthcare or housing or education for its people, and reasonable people disagree about which ways work best. What VPTT does start with is the commitment that human dignity is the right measure to judge a solution by — whatever that solution turns out to be. The how is exactly what gets worked out in the Forum. The whether people’s basic dignity is being protected isn’t up for negotiation.
Democratic Values
Democratic values are about how decisions get made, not just what they produce.
This means real participation — not just the right to vote every few years, but an actual, ongoing voice in the work of understanding a problem and building a solution. It means transparency — being able to see the reasoning behind a conclusion, not just being handed the conclusion itself. And it means accountability — decision-makers being answerable for what they promise and what they actually deliver, not just once, but continuously.
Democratic values also mean something a little less obvious: a real, functioning democracy doesn’t just tolerate disagreement, it depends on it. A healthy process has to make room for people who see a problem differently, weigh evidence differently, or land on a different conclusion — not just people who already agree with each other. VPTT is built to protect that kind of open, honest disagreement, not smooth it over.
Why Both, Together
These two standards do different jobs, and neither one is enough on its own.
Human rights protect the individual — including against a majority that might otherwise vote something away. Democratic values are about the process that gets a whole community from disagreement to a decision. A process can be democratic and still, in a specific case, produce something that fails a human rights test. And a good outcome reached without real participation or transparency isn’t something VPTT would call a success either, even if the result itself looks fine on paper.
So VPTT holds both at once: the how matters (democratic values), and the what matters (human rights). A solution isn’t finished just because a lot of people agreed to it, and it isn’t finished just because it sounds good on principle. It has to hold up on both counts.
Why Two, Not Nine
It would be possible to break this down into a much longer list of specific commitments — transparency, participation, accountability, equal treatment, freedom from discrimination, and so on, each as its own separate item. Plenty of organizations do exactly that.
VPTT keeps it to two on purpose. Almost everything on a longer list like that is really an expression of one of these two ideas underneath. Keeping it to two doesn’t mean covering less ground — it means having a standard simple enough to actually hold any issue up against, instead of a list so long it becomes hard to apply consistently.