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 of your Oslo Freedom Forum, and patron on the Prague-based children’s peace movement, On Personal Feet; the Centipede Youngsters. Prior to his operate at HRF, Halvorssen was cofounder and served as Executive Director and CEO on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education from 1999 till 2004. Halvorssen's opinions and views have appeared in numerous venues like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, The Economist, the Washington Post, NPR, TIME Magazine, the Daily Telegraph, New York Post, and GQ, in addition to tv outlets including Al-Jazeera, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, BBC, HBO, and several other folks. Halvorssen has made many films that focus on freedom and human rights. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude in the University of Pennsylvania with concurrent undergraduate and graduate degrees in political science and history. He sits on HRF's Board of Directors.

Halvorssen personally understands the value of protecting human rights. In August of 1993, his father, a diplomat together with the rank of ambassador, was falsely imprisoned, tortured, and savagely beaten within a Venezuelan jail. His father was released only after Amnesty International, the International Society for Human Rights, and quite a few human rights advocates and public figures took his case. In August of 2004, Halvorssen’s mother, a kid psychologist, was brutally gunned down and wounded by members of your Venezuelan government safety apparatus though 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 1 dead. And in February of 2014 Thor's initial cousin, Leopoldo Lopez, a Venezuelan politician, became a political prisoner in the government of Nicolas Maduro.