This opinion piece was originally published in Panorama (in Norwegian) on 13 February 2025. It is written by Ingeborg Moa, Executive Director for the Norwegian Human Rights Fund.
A few years ago, the Norwegian volunteer patrol group Natteravnene released a video about their work titled ‘What Didn’t Happen.’ The video depicted a scenario in which police officers and paramedics were interviewed, saying things like, ‘It was right here, just recently, that a young man in his twenties was not stabbed and critically injured,’ and ‘It was right here that two teenagers did not get into a fight.’
It was an elegant way of illustrating the value of nonprofit organizations. Their impact is often measured by the very absence of harm—by what does not happen.
This message resonates with us at the Norwegian Human Rights Fund. We support around 150 local human rights organizations worldwide. If they were not there, doing their work, the number of human rights violations in the world would likely be much higher.
Many human rights abuses do not happen because these organizations exist. Many injustices are corrected because of their work.
Local human rights organizations are made up of women, men, LGBTQ+ individuals, farmers, Indigenous peoples in the rainforest, and workers in textile factories. They have seen family members disappear and be killed, experienced harassment from factory managers, or been displaced by guerrilla groups or the military.
Because of their human rights work, they receive threats that their families will be murdered. They face fabricated nude images being spread online to silence them. They are imprisoned and tortured.
What would the world look like without these people, their organizations, and their social movements? We are certain it would be a much worse place.
Countless people and communities owe these organizations their rights—to know the truth about family members killed by the government or others, to retain ownership of the land they tend and the homes they live in, to have rights in the workplace, to be who they are, and to love whom they choose.
Following the Trump administration’s freeze of all USAID funding, we have heard from organizations we support that this has had immediate negative effects on their ability to carry out crucial human rights work. In the face of rising authoritarianism in many countries, we need strong organizations and an active human rights community to take up the fight. This is now becoming more difficult—and those who benefit are the ones who do not want a rule-based world where human rights and democracy stand strong.
What Can Norway Do?
This situation is first and foremost the US administration’s responsibility. Norway cannot ‘fill all the gaps’ created by Trump’s aid-freeze, but Norway can do more than it does today.
The Labour-Centre Party (Ap/Sp) government cut funding in the 2025 state budget to the Foreign Ministry’s budget allocation for Human Rights (Chapter 152, Post 70). Not only must this cut be reversed, but the now Labour-party (AP) government must allocate additional funding to support courageous human rights defenders in the revised national budget.
In the grand scheme, these individuals and organizations are our bulwark against growing authoritarian forces around the world.