The rules and principles of International PEN are listed in
The International PEN Charter.

The Charter has guided, unified, and inspired International PEN members for the last 60 years. Its principles were implicit in the organisation's founding in 1921, but very much like the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International PEN's Charter was fired in the harsh realities of the Second World War.

Finally approved at Congress in Copenhagen in 1948, International PEN's Charter was 22 years in the making.

International PEN affirms that:

1. Literature knows no frontiers and must remain common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals.
2. In all circumstances, and particularly in time of war, works of art, the patrimony of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion.
3. Members of PEN should at all times use what influence they have in favour of good understanding and mutual respect between nations; they pledge themselves to do their utmost to dispel race, class and national hatreds, and to champion the ideal of one humanity living in peace in one world.
4. PEN stands for the principle of unhampered transmission of thought within each nation and between all nations, and members pledge themselves to oppose any form of suppression of freedom of expression in the country and community to which they belong, as well as throughout the world wherever this is possible. PEN declares for a free press and opposes arbitrary censorship in time of peace. It believes that the necessary advance of the world towards a more highly organised political and economic order renders a free criticism of governments, administrations and institutions imperative. And since freedom implies voluntary restraint, members pledge themselves to oppose such evils of a free press as mendacious publication, deliberate falsehood and distortion of facts for political and personal ends.

PEN membership is open to all qualified writers, editors and translators who support PEN's rules and principles, regardless of their nationality, race, skin colour or religion.