Thor Halvorssen (human rights activist)

Background

Halvorssen was born in Venezuela to Hilda Mendoza, a descendant and a relative, respectively, of Venezuela's first president Cristóbal Mendoza and liberator Simón Bolívar. His father is Thor Halvorssen Hellum, who served as a Venezuelan Ambassador for anti-Narcotic Affairs in the administration of Carlos Andrés Pérez and as special overseas investigator of a Venezuelan Senate Commission. His family was prosperous and on his father's side he is the grandson of Øystein Halvorssen, the Norwegian king’s consul who "built a family dynasty as the Venezuelan representative for corporations including Dunlop, Alfa Laval and Ericsson." His cousin is Leopoldo Lopez.

Halvorssen attended the University of Pennsylvania and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, with concurrent undergraduate and graduate degrees in Political Science and History.

Father's imprisonment

When Halvorssen was a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993, his father was arrested while investigating the Medellín cartel for money laundering and bank fraud. His father was tortured, beaten, and in danger of being murdered during his 74-day incarceration in a Caracas jail on "trumped-up" charges of terrorism. Halvorssen led the campaign for his father’s release, garnering help from Amnesty International which issued protests along with other International organizations. Halvorssen was eventually found innocent of all charges. After his release the United Nations-affiliated International Society for Human Rights appointed him director of their Pan-American Committee.

Mother's shooting

While attending a peaceful protest of the Venezuelan recall referendum of 2004, Halvorssen's mother, Hilda Mendoza Denham, a British subject, was shot and wounded. Images of government supporters firing upon the demonstrators were captured by a live television broadcast. The Wall Street Journal published an article about the shooting of Halvorssen's mother written by himself. According to Halvorssen, his mother was gunned down and wounded by members of the Venezuelan government security apparatus while attending a peaceful public gathering. The gunmen’s actions were broadcast on live television as they shot into the crowd, leaving twelve wounded and one (woman) dead. Gunmen were later apprehended, tried, had their sentences revoked, tried again, found guilty, and received 3-year sentences for murder and for bodily harm. They were released after serving six months in prison.

Democracy, civil liberties, and human rights advocacy

Halvorssen has a specialty on matters regarding dictatorships, human trafficking, slavery, and threats to democracy. He has lectured widely on the subject of human rights including at Harvard Law School, the New York City Junto, the United Nations Association in New York, and the American Enterprise Institute. Halvorssen has also spoken at the British parliament.

Lucent Technologies

In 1999, Halvorssen spearheaded a campaign on the floor of the Lucent Technologies annual shareholder meeting appealing for the creation of an anti-slave labor policy whereby Lucent would require China to certify that Lucent's products were not fabricated using slave labor. China's Laogai camps allegedly imprison eight million men, women, and children in 1100 factories, farms, and other facilities producing a wide range of consumer products.

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

In 1999, Halvorssen became the first executive director and chief executive officer of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a U.S. civil liberties organization. As head of FIRE, Halvorssen formed coalitions that brought together the conservative and libertarian advocacy organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, Feminists for Free Expression, the Eagle Forum, with more traditional free speech defenders such as the ACLU. Halvorssen has a track record of defending individuals both on the right and on the left of the political spectrum.

In 2001, Halvorssen stated that, "Liberty of opinion, speech, and expression is indispensable to a free and, in the deepest sense, progressive society. Deny it to one, and you deny it effectively to all. These truths long have been ignored and betrayed on our campuses, to the peril of a free society." In a 2003 moderated chat, he said, "History has taught us that a society that does not respect individual rights, freedom of conscience, and freedom of speech will not long survive as a free society in any form."

Human Rights Foundation

Halvorssen stepped down as head of FIRE in March 2004 to join its Board of Advisors and announced the creation of an international group that would "champion the definition of human rights that originally animated the human rights movement, centered on the twin concepts of freedom of self-determination and freedom from tyranny." HRF was incorporated in 2005, opening its headquarters in New York City in August 2006. Its International Council includes several well-known prisoners of conscience such as Elie Wiesel, Harry Wu, and Vladimir Bukovsky. It also includes democracy activists such as Mart Laar, and Garry Kasparov. Its chairman until his death in December 2011, was Václav Havel.

At the helm of HRF Halvorssen has repeatedly lobbied and advocated for the release of Chinese political prisoner Liu Xiaobo. In 2010 Halvorssen was special guest of Liu Xiaobo at the Nobel Prize ceremony awarding the prize to Liu Xiaobo in absentia. Halvorssen is identified as a supporter of Chinese Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer and has sharply criticized the Tawainese Kuomintang government for its banning visits by Kadeer. Halvorssen has supported UN-level action to address the violations of Uyghur rights in China.

Halvorssen appears as a frequent critic of Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni and, in particular, the legislative efforts in Uganda to punish homosexuality with the death penalty. Halvorssen is a critic of Hugo Chávez, and has written on Venezuela’s anti-Semitism and the assault on democracy and individual rights in Latin America. Halvorssen's criticisms have also been directed at U.S. Republicans such as Jack Kemp as well as Democrats including John Conyers and Jose Serrano. In a symposium published by the American conservative magazine National Review, he condemned Augusto Pinochet for his human rights abuses. Halvorssen led a campaign to expose Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov’s human rights violations and ultimately created a firestorm for Hollywood actress Hilary Swank after she accepted a cash payment to celebrate Kadyrov’s birthday. In the same manner Halvorssen has exposed payments from dictators to Jennifer Lopez, Erykah Baduh, Mariah Carey, Nelly Furtado, and 50 Cent.

Other advocacy campaigns include Panama’s president Ricardo Martinelli on freedom of speech violations; political prisoner cases in Venezuela, Vietnam, Cuba, and Bolivia; as well as the rights of human rights defenders in Colombia.

Oslo Freedom Forum

In 2009, Halvorssen founded a global gathering of human rights advocates called the Oslo Freedom Forum. It has taken place in Oslo annually since then. According to Wired Magazine, "if the global human-rights movement were to create its own unified representative body, it would look something like this."

Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang called it a "Gathering of Heroes". The Economist calls it the "Davos of Human Rights." Participants include Pussy Riot's Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Aliokhina, Sudan's Lubna al-Hussein, Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi, China's Ai Weiwei, Tahrir Square protest organizer Wael Ghonim, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, Iran's Marina Nemat, Peter Thiel, Julian Assange, Václav Havel, Garry Kasparov, Leopoldo Lopez, Nobel laureate Lech Walesa, and Russian political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovskii.

Children's Peace Movement

Since 2009, Halvorssen is listed as "Patron" of the Children's Peace Movement, On Own Feet. Known as the "Centipede Movement" it is a Czech-based group that facilitates bilateral relations between children and adolescents in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Canada, and Norway with children in war-torn countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. The previous Patron was former Czech president Václav Havel.

Film

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Halvorssen is currently producing the film adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Bryan Singer is attached to direct the film.

Halvorssen co-produced the film Freedom's Fury which was executive produced by Lucy Liu, Quentin Tarantino, and Andrew Vajna. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film relates the story of the popular uprising against dictatorship that occurred in Hungary in 1956.

Halvorssen executive produced Hammer & Tickle, a film about the power of humor, ridicule, and satire as the language of truth under Soviet tyranny—jokes as a code to navigate the disconnect between propaganda and reality and as a means of resisting the system despite the absence of free speech. This film premiered at Tribeca in 2006 and featured Lech Wałęsa, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev and Roy Medvedev. The film won Best New Documentary Film at the Zurich Film Festival.

Halvorssen is listed as producer of the documentary Indoctrinate U, "a documentary about left-wing bias on college campuses" which targets "the anti-intellectual, intolerant culture of [the USA's] campuses". American literary theorist Stanley Fish wrote in the New York Times "the academy invites the criticism it receives in this documentary" and the film received positive reviews from the Wall Street Journal, London Telegraph, New York Post, and CNN.

Halvorssen is producer of the film The Singing Revolution, a film about Estonia's peaceful struggle for political independence from Soviet occupation. The film premiered at the Black Nights Film Festival in December 2006 where it received a 15-minute standing ovation. Since then, it has become the most successful documentary film in Estonian box-office history.

Halvorssen produced The Sugar Babies, a film about human trafficking in the Dominican Republic and the plight of its migrant farm workers. The targets of the documentary are wealthy and politically connected sugar barons who live in West Palm Beach: The Fanjul Family. The film previewed at Florida International University where a heated exchange with the Dominican diplomatic envoy resulted in police presence. It received numerous negative reviews claiming the film's portrayal of big business and its relationship with the Dominican government was part of a campaign against the country's reputation. Death threats against the film's director and a bribery scandal involving the Dominican embassy have made the film a subject of intense media interest.

He is listed as sole producer of 2081, the film adaptation of author Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron", a dystopian film about a future in which a tyrannical government arrests, imprisons without trial, and tortures those who disagree with the government policy of enforced sterilization and enforced handicapping. It premiered at the Seattle Film Festival and stars Academy Award nominee Patricia Clarkson, Julie Hagerty, James Cosmo, and Armie Hammer. The film's music was composed by Lee Brooks and recorded by Kronos Quartet.

Awards and recognition

University of Pennsylvania president Judith Rodin honored Halvorssen's achievements by awarding him the Sol Feinstone Award for protecting student speech.

In 2010 Romanian leader Emil Constantinescu presented Halvorssen with a presidential silver medal to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Romanian Revolution of 1989. "On behalf of those who fought and died for freedom, I present this medal to the Oslo Freedom Forum founder, and remind those here that even if Romanians live in democracy now, we cannot feel entirely free as long as other people – who live under dictatorial and repressive regimes anywhere in the world – are not also be free."

Publications