Cries for Freedom
On an array of dissidents, giving their testimonies in Oslo
Dear readers: The Oslo Freedom Forum took place from May 26 to May 28. OFF is the annual human-rights gathering in Norway’s capital. I have already written a little about this year’s gathering, and its people: here. Below are some more notes (journal-style, thus in the present tense).
The Oslo Freedom Forum is a conference of the Human Rights Foundation, based in New York. The CEO of HRF is Thor Halvorssen, a Venezuelan with a Norwegian name. (People have never been confined within boundaries, for long.) He greets the attendees at the 2025 Forum by saying that our “shared mission” is “to champion individual liberty and to confront tyranny wherever it persists.”
Authoritarian regimes “control more than two thirds of the world’s population,” he says. Resistance can seem futile; change can seem impossible.
But “the fight in itself is the right thing to do. It’s the just thing to do. As our former chairman, Václav Havel, once said, ‘Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.’”
I think of the phrase “might makes right.” I’ve heard it a lot in recent times. “Might makes right” is back, people say. “Spheres of influence.” “The law of the jungle.” All that. But you know what makes right? Right.
***
The mayor of Oslo is Anne Lindboe. She tells the audience that her city is the home of the Nobel Peace Prize. She also quotes a Nobel lecture—that given by Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Ukrainian human-rights lawyer. She is the executive director of the Center for Civil Liberties, in Kyiv. The center was a co-winner of the prize for 2022. Ms. Matviichuk represented the center at the ceremony. Naturally, she talked about Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Here is the part of her lecture quoted by Mayor Lindboe:
This is not a war between two states, it is a war between two systems—authoritarianism and democracy. We are fighting for the opportunity to build a state in which everyone’s rights are protected, authorities are accountable, courts are independent, and the police do not beat peaceful student demonstrators in the central square of the capital.
My impression is, Norway as a whole is solidly behind Ukraine, and strongly opposed to Putin. This should be unremarkable. Given what I have seen in my own country, it is not.
(For a piece I wrote about the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, go here. For an interview I conducted with Oleksandra Matviichuk, shortly before the prize was announced, go here.)
***
Many dictatorships are not content to hound their critics within their borders (and worse than hound). If those critics should slip out of the country, those dictatorships pursue them. Tanzania’s is such a dictatorship. On the stage of the Oslo Concert House—the primary venue of the Freedom Forum—Maria Sarungi Tsehai gives powerful testimony.
This past January, she went to her weekly hair appointment in Nairobi. As she was leaving, she was kidnapped, forced into a van. Her abductors were agents of the Tanzanian state (clearly). People in the area saw what was happening. Her supporters were able to sound the alarm. Her abduction became a news story. “After three hellish hours,” she tells us, the agents let her go.
“Tanzania looks serene on the surface,” she says. There are beautiful parks, beautiful mountains. There is beauty everywhere in that country. But the human-rights abuses—something to be aware of.
***
Pedro Urruchurtu has a fascinating tale to tell—gripping, really. He is a Venezuelan oppositionist, and he and several colleagues sought refuge in the Argentinian embassy. They got the refuge. But they were trapped there, by chavista security forces, for a year and two months. The dictatorship cut off their electricity and water. They survived—and were extracted, in a phenomenal operation.
I say to Mr. Urruchurtu later, “It all sounded like a movie!” He says that a movie has indeed been discussed . . .
(To see his presentation in Oslo, go here. To read a story from the Associated Press, go here.)
***
Exceptionally moving is the testimony of Azza Abo Rebieh. She is a Syrian artist. She begins by saying,
I’m from the city of Hama, the city that witnessed the biggest massacre in Syria’s modern history in 1982. They killed over 40,000 martyrs, including my father’s brothers. . . .
My dad, he refused to talk about that day, whenever we asked him. He would say, “Focus on your studies. It’s best for you.” He did not want us to live in animus and hatred. “Look to the future,” he said.
In the future came the Syrian uprising. Ms. Rebieh was arrested in 2015. The horrors she experienced . . . Worse than the torture of oneself, she says, was having to witness the torture of others. I’ll leave it at that.
There came a time when she was transferred to a prison for women and children. Some of the children had been born inside the prison. “There were no mirrors there,” she says, “and the women asked me to draw them because they had forgotten what their faces looked like. They wanted to know what they looked like now.”
(For a New York Times story on this art of hers, go here. For a piece by me on the rise and fall of the Assads, go here.)
***
The sweetest sight in the world is that of Vladimir Kara-Murza, Evgenia Kara-Murza, and Bill Browder on a stage, talking together. The sight of Vladimir Kara-Murza alone is thrilling.
From April 2022 until last August, he was a political prisoner in his country, Russia. His wife, Evgenia, campaigned for him constantly. (She was abroad, in exile.) So did Bill Browder—Sir William Browder, as he is now.
And here they are, before our very eyes. Some of those eyes, I can assure you, are wet.
(Once more, I will throw some links at you—links to articles of mine. For a piece about Vladimir, written shortly after his arrest, go here. For a piece about Evgenia—or Evgenia and Vladimir together—go here. They met in fifth grade, by the way. For a piece about Bill Browder and his notable family, go here.)
***
That night, I have dinner with Vladimir, Evgenia, Bill, and estimable others. If I have been part of a more joyous dinner, I can’t remember it. Stories are passed back and forth, and we all listen intently to what Vladimir has to say. He has come back to us, to speak.
We are sitting by a window. At one point, a woman passes and taps on the glass, smiling and waving gaily. She is Yulia Navalnaya. Brave woman, carrying on with her life, and her work. Her husband, the political leader and prisoner Alexei Navalny, did not make it out of Putin’s gulag. He died—was killed—in February 2024.
Today, Ms. Navalnaya is the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation.
***
Seongmin Lee is a man to know, or know about. He is the director of HRF’s Korea Desk. He does not come from the “light” side of the peninsula—the side with steady electricity and such—but from the other. He escaped North Korea in 2010. He later earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at Columbia University.
A few months ago, Dasl Yoon of the Wall Street Journal wrote an article about him. Its heading: “The North Korean Defector Who’s Been Called a ‘Hero of Ukraine.’” Really? Really. I will quote at some length:
When Ukraine was scrambling this winter to understand how to respond to the threat of thousands of North Korean soldiers deployed to fight alongside Russia, it turned to someone steeped in Pyongyang’s ways: a North Korean defector.
Lee Seongmin, a 37-year-old human-rights worker who is an Ivy League graduate and fluent in English, has helped Ukrainian forces understand the motives driving Kim Jong Un’s young fighters, translating key documents and shaping anti-regime leaflets meant to persuade North Korean soldiers to surrender.
“It feels like I’m conversing with them,” said Lee, who worked for a state agency before fleeing to South Korea, “like I’m a fellow soldier.”
In December, he was even among the first people outside Ukraine to see the trove of diaries, notepads and photos taken from slain North Korean soldiers’ bodies from the Russian front lines.
A bit more, from Ms. Yoon’s article:
While studying at Columbia University, Lee received a scholarship for North Koreans from the George W. Bush Presidential Center. He later met former President George W. Bush at an event commemorating the award recipients.
“I hope you continue to do work that helps the North Korean people,” Lee recalled Bush telling him.
He does impressive work, and so do a great many others, attempting to beat tyranny and usher in the freedom to which everyone is entitled. It’s a privilege to witness, and chronicle.
This is what I was waiting for, and I'm glad to see the links to some of the presentations.
"That night, I have dinner with Vladimir, Evgenia, Bill, and estimable others. If I have been part of a more joyous dinner, I can’t remember it."
One of the great things about my Catholic faith is that I believe I will meet them all, too - and Alexei Navalny as well.
Jay - your description of your dinner with Kara-Murza and Navalny's widow walking by "smiling and waving gaily" at your group brought tears to my eyes. The strength these amazing people have to carry on in the face of unimaginable pain is beyond inspiring. Thank you for continuing to chronicle their stories. When you left NR I feared that no one would pick up your human rights megaphone. Well I didn't have anything to worry about. You brought it with you to Substack. Keep on keeping on, Jay.