Who owns human rights? For generations, the answer was the left -- the anti-fascist left that fought Franco and formed the core of the Free French, and took to the streets to defend the working man against capitalist exploitation. Then, the threat of fascism gave way to communism and Third World revolution, and the left split, first over Stalin and then Castro and Ho Chi Minh and the Sandinistas. Soviet dissidents rejoiced when Reagan thundered, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" The great literary spokesmen for human rights -- Havel, Milosz, Solzhenitsyn -- were the anti-totalitarians from behind the Iron Curtain. And then the wall came down, and autocracy lost its ideological salience. Now we live in the era of Milosevic, Hutu genocide, Iranian theocracy, and the personalized authoritarianism of Putin or Mubarak. So who owns human rights?

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Last week, I attended the second annual Oslo Freedom Forum, a very moving mass testimonial by the men and women who have planted themselves in the path of the world's worst tyrants -- and also an adroit piece of stagecraft. The forum is the brainchild of Thor Halvorssen, a 34-year-old Venezuela-born American of Norwegian background. When I first met Halvorssen three years ago, he was rattling around a few rooms on the eighth floor of the Empire State Building, assembling kits full of brochures and CDs to be smuggled into Cuba by a staff of eager young volunteers. Halvorssen was an activist of the anti-communist right, which had been given new life by the rise of populist authoritarians in Latin America, including Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia.

But Halvorssen had, and has, ambitions far beyond the ideological and geographical confines of his Human Rights Foundation. He spends half his time in Hollywood, a filmmaker trying to cross over from the hothouse of polemics to the big time (though perhaps also of polemics). He had recently finished a 25-minute film -- titled 2081 -- of Kurt Vonnegut's story "Harrison Bergeron", which one of his ubiquitous aides explained was an Ayn Randian tale of a future in which gifted people would be given handicaps to reduce them to the level of the envious masses. When I asked Halvorssen how he planned to market a 25-minute polemical work of fiction, he said, "People in Hollywood aren't just going to give you $80 million to make a feature film. You need a calling card." 2081 didn't sound like an $80 million calling card, but Halvorssen is not a man to be underestimated.

The Oslo Freedom Forum, now in its second year, attracted a largely conservative and libertarian crowd of journalists and spectators, but the speakers' list was shaped with a careful eye to bipartisanship: Conservative journalist Claudia Rosett, a U.N.-hater, was followed by Julian Assange, the Australia-born founder of the website WikiLeaks and a U.S.-hater. The forum felt a little like a string of arias without an opera. One notable after another stepped to the podium to deliver testimony -- Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer and Mukhtar Mai, the Pakistani villager who had become a leading women's rights advocate; Garry Kasparov and Lech Walesa. There were no questions from the audience; the effect was sometimes stupefying.

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