Some 70% of the people on the planet, according to the most frequently cited statistic, live under a dictatorship of one form or another. By the best measures, there are more slaves in the world today than there were when Gen. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. And despite the international legal concept of “genocide” and the multilateral commitments to stop genocide, the practice continues today, such as the one China is perpetrating in Xinjiang. Meanwhile, the use of the term “war crime” certainly appears to have increased, but its prevention has not.
This is, fundamentally, the problem campaigners for human rights face. They’re not wrong about the importance of their cause — whether it’s human freedom, or preventable death, or the rule of law, or economic growth, or mitigating climate change, tyranny is the enemy. But as Irving Howe imperishably observed, good causes attract bad advocates. The campaigns and causes and international bodies aimed at fighting tyranny and supporting dissidents and undoing dictatorship tend to become, in one way or another, part of the problem. Medecins Sans Frontieres makes deals with terrorist groups, and the United Nations introduces plagues to Haiti and is captive to its dictatorial member states. Increasingly politicized foreign policy debates make human rights activists sound like bleeding hearts one day and hard-power realists the next, depending on which authoritarian government is under the hot lights. The entire “global development” aid space, with its tens of billions of dollars a year, wants so badly to give away money that it will overlook the fact that the largesse tends not to make it into the hands of its intended recipients who are most in need of it.
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All that may sound cynical, but I believe it is an accurate, if cold, appraisal of the status quo, which almost surely puts me in the minority among the attendees of this year’s Oslo Freedom Forum, a festival held each summer in the shining, boring Norwegian capital where an incredible combination of people are brought together by the Human Rights Foundation to highlight the problems of the world and to rededicate themselves to the cause.
The entire value proposition of the Human Rights Foundation is that it is supposed to be the good human rights organization, the one that is immune to puerile political fads and evil influences. And it certainly benefits from a comparison to, for example, Human Rights Watch, the biggest player in the space the foundation exists in. Much of Human Rights Watch’s spending and energy is focused on work inside the liberal democratic world, where it can thrive thanks to the very freedom the organization will then relentlessly try to poke holes in. In 2009, its founder and former chairman lamented that “now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.” The result is a culture of whataboutism that unquestionably benefits the actual dictators that Human Rights Watch isn’t spending its time and money on. It’s the donor-reliant NGO world’s version of the fallacy, or intentional rhetorical bias, called threat inflation.
The Human Rights Foundation is not one like that. What sets it apart from comparable organizations, besides, to be blunt, that its outlook isn’t just self-serving American left-wingery du jour, is that it focuses exclusively on the places where it thinks human rights advocacy is actually appropriate and useful, namely dictatorships. This is harder and not necessarily self-sustaining work.
So, what is that work, exactly?
Here’s a sampling of what the Human Rights Foundation actually does to try to achieve what foundation people call “impact” with the money it raises from true believers, tech companies, and presumably some influence peddlers: In its communication, it lobbies the U.N., holds press conferences, and conducts its “global campaigns and advocacy.” Some of this is supporting artists subjected to censorship, including in 2022 paying to rebuild a sculpture by Chinese dissident artist Weiming Chen called CCP Virus, “highlight[ing] how the Chinese government’s incompetence and state censorship sparked the COVID-19 pandemic.” The original sculpture was burned by Chinese agents, so the new one the foundation sponsored was built in steel. Another Human Rights Foundation advocacy spending priority is to name and shame celebrities who work with dictators, including NBA players and Hollywood stars.
Finally, there are the Human Rights Foundation programs that aim to mess directly with dictatorships or help those living in them, such as the “flash drives for freedom” campaign that sees the foundation itself paying for information smuggling into North Korea, trackers to watch how much Western-traded financial products are involved in corrupt countries’ economies, and support for individual dissidents working for or against causes that the foundation wants to help them with. The most important work the Human Rights Foundation does, virtually every foundation official I speak to tells me, is just giving money to the dissidents it identifies as helping fight dictators, and then, maybe as importantly, making sure they meet rich and likeminded people as well as one another to form a global network of people who are connected, through the Human Rights Foundation, by their opposition to tyranny. This reduces, at least to an extent, the cost of opposing dictators and expands the circle of dissidents.
The biggest opportunity for that expansion comes once a year in Oslo. This is the 15th Oslo Freedom Forum, and the second one back after COVID-19 regulations caused it to be displaced to Miami for a year. Over five days, more than 1,300 members and participants would get together, mainly at the Oslo Konserthus, a black-brown gash of modernist metal and stone just inland from where the fjordside Nobel Peace Center gives out its famous prize. We’d hear from parliamentarians of Ukraine, democracy activists from Cuba who had been jailed, the women’s movement leading street protests against Iran’s theocratic leadership, people fighting ubiquitous corruption in Madagascar and Swaziland, escapees from North Korea working to maintain an underground railroad, and a dizzying array of others. The problem of tyranny is massive.
The targeted nature of the foundation’s work can best be explained by the personal family history of its CEO, Thor Halvorssen. His father, also named Thor Halvorssen, was a successful businessman in Caracas made a high-ranking Venezuelan state official. His mother, Hilda Mendoza, descends from the country’s first president, Cristobal Mendoza. Their elite place in Venezuelan society came to a crashing halt when Halvorssen began investigating corruption and was quickly jailed for his efforts. Mendoza suffered a gunshot wound in 2004 attending a protest.
“I’m trying to do as much as I can, the way I’ve learned,” Thor told me, “because nobody helped me when my father was in prison, or when my mother was shot, or as my country descended into an authoritarian country that could have been stopped. If people had started listening in the year 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007…” He trails off but restarts with great intensity. “2008 was the first time the Human Rights Watch did a full report on Venezuela. Nine years — nine years! — they gave the dictator [Hugo Chavez] to establish himself to change the constitution. And as he was changing the constitution, nobody was saying anything in the international human rights sphere, nobody, because they liked him because of the politics. And politics is what is so dangerous in this because they divide people, between right-wing and left-wing, good dictators, bad dictators.”
Human rights doctrines
The history of human rights, as a concept, is one of navigating intangibles. Its theories are perfectly coherent metaphysics, though On Liberty author John Stuart Mill called rights “nonsense upon stilts” and earned hostility from Karl Marx. The idea dates to a letter by early Christian and Roman Carthaginian Tertullian of a right inhering in a human person, rather than being granted to humans by states. It is a lovely concept, and it has proved inspiring to individuals and movements, not least to the American Revolution. Beyond that, for states committed by treaty or domestic law to human rights doctrines, there are enforceable mechanisms for securing those rights. And, people who are denied their rights need some aspiration and justification for standing up; they need something to demand, and they need the world outside to know what it is they’re demanding.
Inside the Konserthus, past the exhibits about previous forum speakers and their triumphs and tribulations, is the big hall, where, to kick things off, Halvorssen bounds onstage in a military-green jacket, a white shirt, and dark jeans, welcoming everyone to “a gathering of some of the most dangerous people on Earth.”
“HRF is the one human rights organization that hasn’t gone woke,” journalist and China-watcher Melissa Chen tells me, glamorously garbed in a silver-scaled affair, at the closing party over a smoke with her boyfriend Winston Marshall, the former banjoist of Mumford and Sons and a heterodox podcaster of sorts for the U.K.’s Spectator magazine. (Chen is on the Human Rights Foundation board.)
Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have blind spots of its own. One panel this year features the unchecked claim that the Israeli military knowingly shoots journalists to kill and then intentionally absconds with their bodies to hide the evidence. Another panel, led by Thor and called "Healing Broken Hearts," is on the ways psychotropic drugs can help dissidents move past trauma. These treatments may be promising, but the language of trauma they come along with is fundamentally illiberal in the way it treats human memory and experience as unfalsifiable, something made all too clear during the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s. It is also dispiriting to see the Human Rights Foundation and the people it supports work so closely with the U.N. — even though Halvorssen himself once produced a documentary on the U.N.’s status as a moral cavity.
Nor is the Human Rights Foundation immune to political sides-picking. Thor produced a documentary called The Dissident about Jamal Khashoggi, the columnist for the Washington Post whose murder in Turkey caused so much international outcry it spurred Joe Biden and the Democrats to threaten the alliance with Saudi Arabia, the state whose crown prince presumably ordered Khashoggi’s gruesome execution. It’s a fraught subject to discuss in any setting, let alone the trampoline Thor and I were bouncing on at the time — the trampoline is just outside the Freedom Forum’s main building so that dissidents at the conference can take the exhortation to lift their spirits literally.
I find the post-murder mythologization of Khashoggi to be insultingly wrong, and I decided to press Thor on why he’d defend the guy. After all, Malcolm Bidali, 2022 Freedom fellow and 2023 Forum speaker, had just the day before told the Konserthus about his experience being trafficked as a migrant worker in Qatar, his human rights abused by a subcompany ultimately owned by the state-controlled Qatar Foundation. And Bidali is now being supported by the Human Rights Foundation to prevent it happening to others. Yet it was the American “charity” arm of that same Qatar Foundation that paid for and even wrote some of the language the Washington Post printed under Jamal Khashoggi’s byline. At best, it’s unethical. At worst, it’s light spycraft by a onetime operator of the Saudis who was loyal to an earlier, and even less liberal, version of his native country’s governance. I had challenged Thor to do a flip as attendees looked on, but this was the first time I got a stern rebuke. “When you are an activist against the dictatorship, and you are given all sorts of restrictions, punishments, and so on,” he said, you take the help you can get. Thor suggested Khashoggi chose realpolitik. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” He seemed to acknowledge the distastefulness of using that as a guiding philosophy but suggested, not entirely convincingly, that in Khashoggi’s case, it was not so different from democratic governments who ally with what otherwise would deserve to be treated as rogue states.
Thor was then whisked by a staffer off the trampoline, past a former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who he introduced to me by saying I’m giving him a “wonderful aggressive interview” with a smirk, and up to the back row of the Konserthus to watch another presentation. There, sitting in the back like whispering class clowns, he told me the goal of the Human Rights Foundation is to keep growing “like a mycelium mushroom underground, spreading throughout the world, using different mediums, to finance these heroic figures.”
Those figures are an eclectic bunch. I turned to see the stage now belonged to 25-year-old Swedish pop star Zara Larsson for a few upbeat numbers. Turns out she’s associated with the Forum because she turned down a sponsorship by Chinese state-affiliated tech firm Huawei. That same stage had earlier been the site of a presentation by Pastor Seungeun Kim, who helps smuggle North Korean defectors and refugees from the North Korea-China border to South Korea.
The final day took things to SALT, an outdoor event space perched on a dock overlooking the Opera House and the Munch Museum, where the speeches were held in the bright sun and in relaxing traditional Nordic huts and modernist shipping container buildings next to picnic tables or on a boat landing where, between sessions on the Iraq War and the like, participants could change into provided unisex bathing suits to jump into the refreshing fjord.
But what I’ve discovered is that the key to “Davos for Dissidents,” as it’s often unofficially known, is that the official setting isn’t the point. At the Oslo Freedom Forum, the most important thing may always be happening offstage, where some billionaire is deciding to fund some book project that starts a movement, or some campaign that could topple a dictator, or just makes somebody’s miserable life nonmiserable.
Nobody is going to be the Human Rights Foundation if the Human Rights Foundation isn’t. “It used to be there was no alternative,” Thor said. “The only alternatives were some cookie cutter that was created solely and exclusively to focus on the state of Israel, doing barely, barely believable work never taken seriously by anyone. We built something that’s real, that is undeniable, and that they can no longer touch as much as they try to destroy it.”
Tyranny is not a problem that is about to go away, though if you squint at Russia’s self-destructive war in Ukraine, China’s post-zero-COVID instability, and Iran’s well-deserved street protests, and let yourself engage in a certain wild hope, you may be able to imagine a world that gets radically freer, maybe even soon. There’s less reason for optimism about Venezuela, which may have been Thor’s white whale that got away for good in 2018 when the legitimately elected leader of the country was exiled and Chavez’s even dimmer successor blocked the country from its own neighbors and its own future. Whatever that means to Thor personally, the dissidents helped by the Human Rights Foundation don’t feel like consolation prizes, and they aren’t. And there’ll be more of them, too, so long as the Human Rights Foundation continues to see its wayward rivals as cautionary tales.
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Nicholas Clairmont is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.