A showcase for civil society and civil rights in Oslo
Jonathan Foreman, 30 April 2014
It’s one of those grimly comic instances of ironic good timing that Norway – of all places – has just been slammed for human rights violations by Saudi Arabia – of all places — as part of the UN’s “Universal Periodic Review,” only days before the opening of this year’s Oslo Freedom Forum.
Sometimes described as “the Davos of Human Rights” the Oslo Freedom Forum, now in its sixth year, is a remarkable showcase for the efforts of civil society organizations and campaigners for political and religious liberty from around the world.
This year’s Forum opens in the Norwegian capital on May 12th and runs until the 14th. As always it brings together an extraordinary variety of dissidents, activists, academics and journalists, some of whom have recently escaped from closed or dangerous societies.
Unlike many other conferences in the NGO, aid and human rights world, the Oslo Freedom Forum is not beholden to the soft tyranny of political correctness or the unthinking leftist or anti-Western or anti-American prejudices that have increasingly marred events promoted by behemoths like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch.
Thus it can feature presentations by Cuban bloggers, by publishers censored or shut down in Venezuela, and people like Guadelupe Llori, an Ecuadorian governor imprisoned by the left leaning government in Quito after she stood up for striking miners.
At previous OFF’s I’ve heard presentations by Tibetan monks, Kurdish activists, former slaves from Nepal, Haiti and Cambodia, Iranian dissidents, Vincent Manoharan the Indian campaigner for Dalit (“untouchable”) rights, various key figures from the “Arab Spring” like the Tunisian blogger Lina Ben Mhenni, Bangladeshi child-bride turned activist Arzina Begum, the conflict psychologist and mental health campaigner Justine Hardy, and experts in high tech transparency.
Every year it presents a prize in memory of Vaclav Havel. Last year’s laureates were the North Korean democracy activist Park Sang Hak, the Cuban civil society group Ladies in White, and the Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat.
This years speakers will include, among others, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian former oligarch sent to Siberia by Vladimir Putin, Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia, the North Korean defector Hyeonseo Lee, and Flemming Rose, the Danish newspaper editor responsible for commissioning the Jyllands-Posten controversial Mohammed cartoons in 2005.
The Forum is produced by the New York based Human Rights Foundation and is the brainchild of Thor Halvorssen, a Venezuelan-Norwegian human rights advocate whose mother Hilda Mendoza Denham, a British citizen, was shot and wounded by government operatives during a peaceful demonstration in Caracas in 2004.
(Halvorssen first achieved reknown as a campaigner for freedom of speech in American academia. He produced the film Indoctrinate U, a documentary about political correctness and leftist censorship on US campuses and was the founder and executive director of America’s Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.)
Places at this year’s Forum are limited but all the events are put on line at oslofreedomforum.com and Youtube.