Speakers

Head of Center for International Justice at The Norwegian Helsinki Committee, Oslo. Chair of the Board of the Norwegian Non-Fiction Writers’ and Translators’ Association (NFFO). Member of the board of Truth Hounds (Ukraine). Freelance journalist and columnist. Writer of fiction and non-fiction.

Abetare Krasniqi is a specialist in hate crime and has worked as an investigator and acting head of what is now called the National Competency Environment in Hate Crime.
She works in an EEA-funded project position, which ha...

is a Polish lawyer, educator, and human rights activist. He was the Polish Ombudsman for Citizen Rights from 2015 until July 2021. He was awarded the Rafto prize in 2018.

Adele Matheson Mestad is a Norwegian lawyer. She is the director of the Norwegian National Human Rights Institution, a position that the Storting appointed her to March 26, 2019. Previously, Matheson Mestad worked for ten years as a lawyer for the Government Attorney.

Agnes Callamard is Secretary General of Amnesty International. Previously, she was Special Rapporteur appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council..

Ali Dorani is a cartoonist, SA and human rights activist known as Mr. EatenFish. He is from Iran and has been well known for artworks he created in a remote prison (Immigration Prison Camps) in Papua New Guinea and Australia. His cartoons are about his own life as an immigrant (Refugee) and sexual assault victim. He has been sharing his stories with the world since 2015. My work has been published in hundreds of articles and numerous international newspapers such as Washington Post, The Guardian, ABC News, France 24, BBC

Sami joik artist and an associate professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Tromsø, specializing in Indigenous Rights Law. One of the cofounders of the Sámi publishing house and record label Dat.

Anniken Scharning Huitfeldt (b. 1969) is a Norwegian historian and politician for the Labour Party. She has served as Minister of Foreign Affairs since 2021. She previously served as Minister of Children and Equality from 2008 to 2009, Minister of Culture from 2009 to 2012 and Minister of Labour and Social Inclusion from 2012 to 2013.

Astrid Hoem is the Chair of the Youth organization of Norwegian Labour Party, and a survivor of the terrorist attack at Utøya in July 22, 2011.

Barbara Trionfi is Executive Director of the International Press Institute (IPI), a global network of editors, media executives and leading journalists dedicated to safeguarding and fostering media freedom and promoting quality, independent journalism.

President of the International Publishers Association (IPA).
A trailblazer in the global publishing scene, Bodour Al Qasimi is creating a positive impact on the world by pushing IPA’s agenda on freedom to publish and intellectual property rights. In 2019, Bodour Al Qasimi’s work in the field of women’s empowerment crossed a unique milestone as she established PublisHer – an informal networking body that seeks to increase the number of women in leadership roles within the publishing industry.
As the CEO...

Works as an advisor at Safemuse- Safe Havens for Artists and is the leader of the human rights organization FIVAS.

Christine Sørensen (b. 1981) is Government Affairs and Public Policy Manager at Google.

Dex Hunter-Torricke is Vice President of Global Communications & Public Engagement for Meta’s Oversight Board, the independent body established in 2020 to make decisions on the most significant content moderation challenges on Facebook and Instagram. He previously served as head of communications for SpaceX, and in roles for Google, Facebook and the United Nations.

Dr. Dmitry Dubrovsky is an expert on human rights in Russia and focuses primarily on issues relating to xenophobia, ultra-right nationalism, hate crimes, and hate speech as they relate to freedom of conscience and freedom of speech.

Dmitry Muratov is a journalist, editor, and co-founder of the Russian pro-democracy newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Muratov has been a vocal critic of the authoritarian developments in Russia and of the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. He supported the protests in Belarus in 2020 and is a member of the opposition party Jabloko.
He shared the 2021 Nobel peace prize with Maria Ressa for th...

Ella Marie Hætta Isaksen (b. 1998) is an artist, climate activist and front figure in the band ISÁK. In 2018, she won NRK’s ​​Sternekamp. In 2021, she debuted as a writer with Derfor må du vite jeg er same.

Farzana Kochai (b. 1992) is an Afghan politician. She has been a member of Afghan Parliament (Wolesi Jirga).

Veteran journalist, media innovator, and senior executive, Fatemah Farag is the Founder and Director of Welad Elbalad Media Services LTD, a company dedicated to community media development and media excellence in Egypt. She is the first Arab woman and first Egyptian to have been voted to the Executive Committee and Board of WAN IFRA and is the former Arab Region Director for WAN IFRA’s Women in News Program (WIN).

Guzel Yakhina is an award-winning Russian author and screenwriter. She received the Big Book literary prize and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award for her 2015 debut novel Zuleikha.

Head of News division at NRK, Norwegian Broadcasting. Chair of the board, Faktisk (Norwegian fact checking organization). Previous vice president of World Editors’ Forum.

Helle Thorning-Schmidt is the former Prime Minister of Denmark, a position she held from 2011 to 2015. She also served as leader of the opposition and party leader in the Danish Parliament and as a member of European Parliament. She is currently the co-chair of Meta’s Oversight Board, the independent body established in 2020 to make decisions on the most significant content moderation challenges on Facebook and Instagram.

ISÁK has been a hype in Sápmi music for a long time, renowned for its energetic live shows and intense presence. Since their debut in 2017 the trio has experienced an overwhelming response in Norway, and now the «sensation from Sápmi» is finally ready to take on the rest of the world.

Coordinator for the Freedom of Expression Committee in Börsenverein, The German Publishers and Booksellers Association, and Freedom of Expression Week from 2016 to 2022. Co-organized the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade from 2017 to 2019. He studied Sociology and Philosophy in Florida, Amsterdam and Frankfurt.

John Peder Egenæs is Secretary General of Amnesty International in Norway. He has worked in Amnesty since 1990, and been Secretary General since 2007.

Jørgen Watne Frydnes (b. 1984) is a Norwegian administrator and politician. Frydnes has been CEO of Utøya AS since 2011. In 2020 he was elected member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee for the period 2021–2026. He is a board member of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee.

Regina Pérez is a professional journalist and social communicator. She has been working in journalism for 12 years, where she has worked both as reporter and editor. During her first years in journalism she worked at the CERIGUA news agency on issues such as freedom of expression and of freedom of the press. She then worked for 7 years in the newspaper La Hora, where she worked with digital media, as a reporter, editor and later as editor-in-chief. Since November 2020 she has been working at Prensa Comunitaria (Community Press) where she covers issues related to human rights, indigenous peoples, criminalization and historical memory.

Kadafi Zaman is a Norwegian journalist and presenter. He is known as a reporter for the Norwegian TV network TV2 and for the documentary series Norway behind the façade.

Kira Yarmysh (b. 1989) is educated at the prestigious MGIMO diplomatic school in Moscow. She worked in communications in the airline industry before becoming Aleksey Navalny’s press spokesperson in 2014. She has served several shorter prison sentences since 2018 and lives in political exile in Western Europe today.

Kjersti Løken Stavrum is a Norwegian editor and media executive. She was secretary-general of the Norwegian Press Association from 2013 to 2016. She is CEO of the Tinius Foundation and head of Norwegian PEN. She is currently head of the Norwegian Free Speech Commission.

Consultant, managing director of World Expression Forum AS, chair of the Freedom to Publish Committee in the International Publishers Association and chair of Norges Televisjon.

Academic, diplomat and politician. Former deputy minister/state secretary with the Office of the Prime Minister and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Norway. Research field: Terrorism and violent extremism. Member of the 22 July Commission / Breivik inquiry. Published author. Board member. Chair of the Board of Lillehammer Museums.

Lisa Ann Cooper is the founder and CEO of several social enterprises in Norway that are focused on creating social change with a focus on diversity and inclusion, arts, culture and youth. She has founded Catalysts, a mentoring program to promote the strengths and well-being of young people across Norway.

Lise Klaveness is the director of the Norwegian Football Association, nominated as the coming president of the association.

Chair of World Expression Forum. Publisher and president of Aschehoug. Twenty years of experience in the publishing industry. Former CEO and vice president of two newspaper/media companies; Dagsavisen and Avishuset Dagbladet. Board member of The Norwegian Publishers Association and a number of other companies.

Maria Ressa is one of the two 2021 Nobel Peace Prize Laureates. She is the co-founder, CEO, and executive editor of Rappler.com, an online news organization in the Philippines. Ressa has been honoured around the world for her courageous and bold work in fighting disinformation, “fake news”, and attempts to silence the free press. TIME magazine named her in their Person of the Year feature for 2018 and one of the 100 Most Influential People in 2019. She has faced threats and persecution because of her work for freedom of expression. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to her for her “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace”. In her Nobel lecture, she addressed the global problem of disinformation in social media: “An invisible atom bomb exploded in our information ecosystem, and the world must act as it did after Hiroshima. Like that time, we need to create new institutions, like the United Nations, and new codes stating our values, like the universal declaration of human rights, to prevent humanity from doing its worse. It’s an arms race in the information ecosystem. To stop that requires a multilateral approach that all of us must be part of. It begins by restoring facts”.

Marianne Knudsen is a student and head of the Norwegian Disability Association Youth (NHFU). In 2021, the Ministry of Culture appointed her as a member of the Free Speech Commission. She is also an ambassador for the Youth Campaign Stop Hate Speech and has been a member of the Youth Free Speech Council.

Mohamed Kharwa is an President of the South African Booksellers Association, and Director of Pro Visions Books part of a diversified SMME that includes an online and physical retailer in educational supply, to a software development Business.
A trained Pharmacist he has worked in/with industries as varie...

Nancy Herz is State Secretary of the Ministry of Labour and Social Inclusion (Labour Party). She has been leading the Young People’s Freedom of Expression Council, and is a human rights activist and writer. Herz, together with Amina Bile and Sofia Srour, started the movement called The Shameless Girls by the media, which put negative social control and the fight against shame and culture of honour on the agenda.

Paminder Parbha is a human rights researcher/campaigner with over 25 years of experience and the Head of International Programs in PEN International.

He is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives, a news medium focused on the international trade book publishing industry’s trends and issues.
Anderson’s work over more than three decades in newspapers, news mag...

Sebastien Lai is the son of Jimmy Lai, who, along with The Apple Newsroom in Hong Kong, received The Golden Pen Award last year and is now imprisoned in Hong Kong.

Svitlana Valko, is a human rights defender, a field monitor, director of the Truth Hounds Georgia Office and field mission manager in IPHR-Truth Hounds in Ukraine. She is a qualified coach on human rights. For more than 8 years Svitlana has been coordinating the various projects in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Věra Jourová is a Czech politician and lawyer. She is the Vice President of the European Commission for Values and Transparency nd previously served as the European Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality.

Victor Pickard is the C. Edwin Baker professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he co-directs the Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center. He is the author or editor of six books, including America’s Battle for Media Democracy; After Net Neutrality; and, most recently, Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society.

Vivian works as a freelance producer and has more than 20 years of experience in the private and public field of arts and culture. She is also the project manager and owner of Kulturhjerte, an artistic organization located in Lillehammer that produces stage performances with children and young people from all over the world.