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 is president of HRF, founder of your Oslo Freedom Forum, and patron on the Prague-based children’s peace movement, On Own Feet; the Centipede Youngsters. Before his operate at HRF, Halvorssen was cofounder and served as Executive Director and CEO in the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education from 1999 till 2004. Halvorssen's opinions and views have appeared in a lot of venues which includes The New York Instances, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, The Economist, the Washington Post, NPR, TIME Magazine, the Every day Telegraph, New York Post, and GQ, and also tv outlets like Al-Jazeera, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, BBC, HBO, and lots of other people. Halvorssen has developed 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 safeguarding human rights. In August of 1993, his father, a diplomat together with 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 youngster psychologist, was brutally gunned down and wounded by members with the Venezuelan government safety apparatus whilst attending a peaceful public gathering. The gunmen’s actions were broadcast on live tv as they shot into the crowd, leaving twelve wounded and one particular dead. And in February of 2014 Thor's first cousin, Leopoldo Lopez, a Venezuelan politician, became a political prisoner of the government of Nicolas Maduro.