Oslo Freedom Forum (OFF) is a series of global conferences run by the New York–based non-profit Human Rights Foundation under the slogan “Challenging Power”. The forum aims to bring together notable people, including former heads of state, winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, prisoners of conscience, as well as of other public figures in order to network and exchange ideas about human rights and exposing dictatorships.
Aah yes, the electronic intifada, such an excellent, neutral source for reporting.
Many orgs don’t disclose donors, particularly those working on human rights. Imagine you are a rich person in a dictatorship who wants to improve human rights in your country, do you want your name listed on the donor registry for Amnesty International? Probably not. Amnesty, btw, sponsors the freedom forum as well alongside the city of Oslo. So Either Amnesty is in on this 4D chess you’re seeing where the far right is somehow using human rights as a cover to… give us all more privacy or something, or maybe Amnesty did their due diligence and concluded that this org is worth working with.
The article states that “Who is Halvorssen? He is best known as the founder and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, where he is listed as the lone staff member.”, yet their site lists over a dozen people. So that’s just a clearly factually inaccurate statement right there, makes me question the validity of the entire thing if they can’t get something that simple correct. https://hrf.org/about/team/
“Halvorssen is the scion of an oligarchic Venezuelan family closely linked to the political opposition that formed against recently deceased former President Hugo Chavez”
Hmm… I wonder if living under an autocrat might have made him care about human rights and free expression.
Believe it or not, people on the “far right” can care about human rights too, and can donate to human rights organizations, and that’s ok. I challenge you to find any major human rights or civil liberties organization that doesn’t have somebody “far right” or whom you otherwise disagree with strongly. Human rights is an issue that cuts across many different political ideologies. And these organizations can build tools and infrastructure to support human rights all around the globe, and do. We shouldn’t be cancelling organizations just because they got money from somebody we disagree with or even detest. What they actually do with that money should be what matters, something your accusations against this org are completely devoid of because they are actually doing good things. What they’re actually doing is advancing the cause of human rights globally.
It is not. The article is from 2013. Back then, that linked worked and shows exactly what the article is saying: he’s the only staff member listed. That was 8 years after the founding btw.
And since the guy is clearly rich and has lots of political connections, you’d figure he’d have sued EF by now if there was anything incorrect in that article.
Oh you launched into a whole defense of working with the far-right. Figures.
Yeah they care about human rights when they can weaponize them to pressure or topple governments that resist exploitation. Which is what the Oslo Freedom Forum is all about.
That or he’s pissed that they took his father’s Telco empire, and now he wants to topple the Venezuelan government and get his “birthright” back. We may never know.
Also you avoided the whole part of in the article about what he was up to before the HRF. That guy was clearly an activist conservative bigot at the very least, and so he naturally evolved into a Mr. Human Rights Guy. He doesn’t just take money from far-right dipshits, he himself is a reactionary.