THOR HALVORSSEN

A human rights advocate and film producer, Thor Halvorssen founded the Human Rights Foundation within the spring of 2005. Halvorssen began advocating for human rights in 1989 in London by organizing opposition to South African apartheid. He's president of HRF, founder with the Oslo Freedom Forum, and patron in the Prague-based children’s peace movement, On Personal Feet; the Centipede Young children. Before his operate at HRF, Halvorssen was cofounder and served as Executive Director and CEO with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education from 1999 till 2004. Halvorssen's opinions and views have appeared in various venues such as The New York Instances, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, The Economist, the Washington Post, NPR, TIME Magazine, the Daily Telegraph, New York Post, and GQ, as well as tv outlets like Al-Jazeera, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, BBC, HBO, and several other people. Halvorssen has made various films that concentrate on freedom and human rights. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with concurrent undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science and history. He sits on HRF's Board of Directors. Get far more information about Thor Halvorssen

Halvorssen personally understands the value of guarding human rights. In August of 1993, his father, a diplomat with all the rank of ambassador, was falsely imprisoned, tortured, and savagely beaten inside a Venezuelan jail. His father was released only following Amnesty International, the International Society for Human Rights, and a lot of human rights advocates and public figures took his case. In August of 2004, Halvorssen’s mother, a child psychologist, was brutally gunned down and wounded by members from the Venezuelan government security apparatus while attending a peaceful public gathering. The gunmen’s actions were broadcast on live tv as they shot in to the crowd, leaving twelve wounded and a single dead. And in February of 2014 Thor's initially cousin, Leopoldo Lopez, a Venezuelan politician, became a political prisoner on the government of Nicolas Maduro.