It would help if you asked a more specific question. Right now the answer to what the political stance of the authors is – there was no single political stance, if there was such a stance at all. But let us start in 1975, when several nations including Czechoslovakia signed what we call the Helsinki Accords. This declaration resulted from prolonged negotiations during the Cold War and covered several topics, with human rights and fundamental freedoms being the key point of interest for the developments of Charter 77.

The Charter and its signatories were concerned with the protection of human rights in socialist Czechoslovakia, and the key event after which the project took off was provided by the prosecution of the highly unwelcome by the autorities and nonconformist band The Plastic People of the Universe in late 1976. As the government again acknowledged the issue of human rights with the Helsinki Accords – although they had, at least on paper, made mentions of these rights and liberties before, such as in the 1960 constutition – the future proponents of the Charter now had a solid base from which to launch their initiative.

Not as a direct challenge to the ruling regime, nor as a political entity, but as a voluntary – and voluntarily limited – movement without any formal existence or membership. Charter 77 and its aims were to be more of an observer of whether the government actually followed the accords it had promised to. Indeed it contains passages along the lines of "(Charter 77) not creating the basis for any sort of opposition political activity". At the same time it was not nonconfrontational in its content, and it was the subject of severe repression immediately after publishing.

The original Charter was signed by over two hundred people ranging from philosophers to playwrights and poets, and perhaps this coupled with the above paragraphs might already make clearer the answer to the question of the individual politics of those involved – that they were not the driving force behind Charter 77, and the political points of view involved were vastly varied.

Take Pavel Kohout, writer, poet, and a staunch proponent of communism in his early years. Nonetheless his beliefs have changed and by the time of the Charter he had been strongly opposed to the regime for several years. Vaclav Benda was at first not actively engaged against the government, but after the events of the seventies he had become a strong anticommunist.

However, then there were the likes of Zdenek Mlynar, a high ranking member of the communist party during the time of the Prague Spring. Or Petr Uhl, an influential left wing thinker to this day. Several of the signatories were also motivated by religion or philosophy and ethics, such as Jan Patocka, one of the most important Czech philosophers. Patocka died shortly after an interrogation by the state police following his involvement in the initiative.

However, not all enemies of the system shared the same hopes and beliefs in the Charter. Cardinal Frantisek Tomasek was critical of the communist government, but at the same time did not support Charter 77 exactly because several former or reformed communists were involved in it.

Charter 77 was certainly not apolitical, as the issue of human rights ties directly to politics. However, particularly at the time of its conception – as with time it went on to cover more topics and many of the people involved would later take more active roles in shaping the future of the country – it was not political in the sense that it would be a direct involvement in, or a challenge against, the government and the political system in its entirety.

Let me attempt to translate Vaclav Havel, one of the key Charter 77 figures: "The Charter is neither 'left' nor 'right' not because it is 'in between', but for a more profound reason: it belongs nowhere on this spectrum, by its very nature it exists outside of it. As an entity with no political platform it is – if one might put it this way – above all that. Its aims are truth, the truthful representation of reality and an objective and free criticism thereof."

Well, many of the Charter 77 authors went on to be active politicians in the post-communist Czech and Slovak republics, so this might be a better way to figure out their political views than trying to read into the text of Charter 77.