Too often the term “human rights” has been misused or cheapened.
Take the UN Human Rights Council, which has become a standing joke
because so many of its 47 member countries kill or torture their
opponents. Indeed, the latest candidate for membership put up by
Latin America is Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, which in February refused
to vote for a UN resolution criticizing Syria’s brutal killing of
civilians and continues to ship oil to the Assad regime.
The Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual event organized by the New
York-based Human Rights Foundation, is rehabilitating the concept
that people of good will can promote basic rights in all nations at
all times without an overlay of ideology or hypocrisy. Indeed, at
the meeting I attended last May, there was no desire to blame
racism or gender discrimination on the U.S. or other Western
nations.
“We all should want freedom of speech, freedom of association,
freedom from torture, freedom to travel, due process and freedom to
keep what belongs to you,” says Thor Halvorssen, a human-rights
activist and the conference’s 36-year-old founder. “Our goal is to
popularize human rights, end the monopoly of the experts who have
colonized the space and make it something relevant, easy to grasp,
and exciting for people to be able to participate in.”
The conference’s “fair play” approach has made it a place where
others can spot up-and-comers. Liberian rights advocate Leymah
Gbowee spoke at the 2011 Oslo Freedom Forum and members of the
Nobel Committee came and listened. Five months later, they gave her
the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize. Ugandan equal rights advocate Kasha
Jacqueline spoke about persecution against gays in her country at
the forum the year before that. Shortly afterward, she won the
Martin Ennals Award, the world’s premier human rights prize. But,
sadly, early this year Ugandan government stooges assaulted her and
forced her into hiding.
The range of speakers showcased at OFF is stunning. A visitor to
the Reagan Library in California will see a permanent collection of
forum videos that showcase speakers such as the late Elena Bonner,
Russian human rights activist and wife of Andrei Sakharov; the late
Czech President Václav Havel; and Lech Walesa, Nobel laureate and
leader of Poland’s Solidarity movement.
When speakers cannot physically appear at OFF, conference
staffers still get their testimony. In 2010, they traveled to
Vietnam and conducted an undercover interview with Thich Quang Do.
As the head of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam—a banned
organization—he is a unifying symbol of Vietnam’s pro-democracy
movement, despite being held under house arrest since 1983. The
video of him premiered at the 2010 Oslo Freedom Forum, was later
shown at a congressional meeting, and is used by Vietnamese groups
abroad to educate and inspire.
Many speakers appear at the Oslo meeting at great personal risk.
Ales Bialiatski of Belarus spoke at OFF in 2009, and for most of
the last year he has been imprisoned by the dictator there. After
North Korean defector Park Sang-Hak spoke, North Korean agents
tried but failed to assassinate him with poisoned needles. Ali
Abdulemam, a blogger from Bahrain, was scheduled to speak at last
year’s forum but had to cancel after being forced into hiding and
sentenced to jail in absentia.
The conferences bring together and help bond activists from
far-flung corners of the world. Vladimir Bukovsky, the great
Soviet-era dissident and scientist who was tortured by the KGB for
years, has come to warn that many of Russia’s old oppressors are
“safely in power again” in new guises.
Palden Gyatso, a diminutive Tibetan monk, has told horrifying
tales of being imprisoned for 33 years and being tortured by
Chinese captors who wedged electric batons into his mouth and
destroyed all of his teeth. After his talk, he was embraced by
Harry Wu, a survivor of 19 years in China’s network of labor camps,
which still contains untold numbers of prisoners.
At one conference I attended, Abdel Nasser Ould Ethmane kept his
audience riveted as he told how he’d been raised in an elite
Mauritanian family that kept slaves even after the practice was
officially abolished in his land in 1981. While living in Paris as
an adult, he became infuriated at the world’s indifference to
slavery and teamed up with a former slave from Mauritania to
provide legal help to escapees and also conduct covert rescue
operations of those still in bondage. Ethmane’s talk was followed
by presentations from two powerful speakers from Kurdistan and
Uzbekistan, both women who had served prison time for pro-democracy
activism.
All of this ferment has attracted support from people who want
to see human rights promoted outside the prism of narrow
ideologies. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and a major
booster of libertarian causes, has supported the conference since
its inception in 2009. Thiel recently told me that he views the
conference as a place where human rights “isn’t handled as being
from the right or left, but rather from an up or down perspective.”
Similarly, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google and a major backer
of President Obama, has just added the conference to the list of
grants given out by the foundation he established with his
wife.
“We include controversial figures, provocative contributors and
forgotten voices, but few professional ‘experts’ in human rights,”
Halvorssen told me. His range of speakers has included Julian
Assange, who spoke long before the Wikileaks scandal that made him
infamous. Victor Hugo Cardenas, a former vice president of Bolivia
who is of indigenous heritage, used the conference to denounce the
“shock troops” deployed by President Evo Morales to silence
critics.
“But you will hear little of this from our media, much of which
is bought by the Venezuelan money of Hugo Chavez,” he
thundered.
In turn the forces allied with Chavez and his mentor Fidel
Castro have targeted the Oslo Freedom Forum. Before one conference,
the Cuban Embassy in Norway denounced the forum, accusing
Halvorssen of being a CIA agent.
Halvorssen expressed both amusement and exasperation at the
charges. “They accuse me of having worked for the CIA in the 1970s,
when I was an infant, inside countries I’ve never visited,” he told
me.
But overall Halvorssen remains optimistic. He recognizes that no
matter how unyielding or deceitful authoritarian governments can
be, providing a space for human-rights dissidents to network and
reach a wider audience can hasten the day when some of those
governments finally topple.
