Thor Halvorssen Mendoza

Thor Halvorssen Mendoza

Thor Leonardo Halvorssen Mendoza (born in Caracas 1976)—commonly known as Thor Halvorssen—is a Venezuelan human rights advocate and film producer with contributions in the field of public policy, public interest advocacy, individual rights and civil liberties, and pro-democracy advocacy. The New York Times described Halvorssen in an August 2007 profile as a maverick "who champions the underdog and the powerless." He is a columnist for the left-leaning Huffington Post and also writes for Forbes magazine.

Halvorssen is founder of the Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual gathering described by The Economist as a "spectacular human-rights festival... on its way to becoming a human-rights equivalent of the Davos economic forum". Halvorssen is president of the Human Rights Foundation, an organization devoted to protecting liberty in the Americas. He is the Patron of the Czech-based Children's Peace Movement, On Own Feet, and founder of the Moving Picture Institute. Halvorssen bought the traditionally leftist Norwegian news magazine Ny Tid in May 2010.

Halvorssen's opinions have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, Time magazine, The Nation and National Journal, and he has appeared on television outlets such as al-Jazeera, Fox News Channel’s The O'Reilly Factor and Hannity & Colmes, MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, CNN, and HBO.

Thor Halvorssen was a speaker at TEDx at the University of Pennsylvania in October 2010.