HUMAN RIGHTS FOUNDATION
LOCATION: NEW YORK
FOUNDER: THOR HALVORSSEN
INCEPTION: 2005
ABOUT THE HUMAN RIGHTS FOUNDATION
The Human Rights Foundation (HRF) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes and protects human rights globally, with a focus on closed societies. HRF unites people in the common cause of defending human rights and promoting liberal democracy. Its mission is to ensure that freedom is both preserved and promoted around the world. The organization focuses its work on the founding ideas of the human rights movement: those most purely represented in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1976 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
HRF works toward its mission:
- By supporting activists and providing them the resources, skills, contacts, and attention they need to make a difference in their countries;
- By popularizing the struggle for freedom and democracy, and against dictatorship, and by bringing human rights into the mainstream of global public discussion; and
- By producing international legal reports, public letters, and op-eds that can influence institutions, policymakers, and the public at large in the direction of better protecting individual rights in countries ruled by authoritarian regimes.
ABOUT THE FOUNDER
Thor Halvorssen is a human rights advocate and film producer. He began advocating for human rights as a teenager in London by organizing opposition to South African apartheid. Described by the New York Times as a “champion of the underdog and the powerless,” he is president of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation (HRF), an organization devoted to liberating political prisoners and to challenging dictatorships. He is founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual global gathering described by The Economist as a “human-rights equivalent of the Davos economic forum.” In 2020 Thor produced the critically acclaimed documentary “The Dissident,” about the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Thor personally understands the importance of protecting human rights. When Thor was 19 his father, a diplomat with the rank of ambassador, was falsely imprisoned, tortured, and savagely beaten in a Venezuelan jail. In August of 2004, Thor’s mother, a child psychologist, was brutally gunned down and wounded by members of the Venezuelan government security apparatus while attending a peaceful public gathering. And in February of 2014, Thor’s first cousin, Leopoldo Lopez, a Venezuelan politician, became a political prisoner of the government of Nicolas Maduro.
Thor has lectured at universities across the world on matters of liberty and his opinions and views have appeared in numerous venues including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, TIME, the Daily Telegraph, New York Post, and GQ, as well as television outlets such as Al-Jazeera, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, BBC, HBO, and many others. Thor graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with concurrent undergraduate and graduate degrees in Political Science and History.
