I had wondered if the event could possibly be as powerful as the first forum last year, when I had witnessed Tibetan monk Palden Gyatso take out his dentures and explain with a gummy smile that during his 30 years of imprisonment by Chinese occupation forces his torturers jammed an electric cattle prod into his mouth again and again until he lost all his teeth.

Lubna al-Hussein and Lubna al-Hussein

As it turned out it was almost too overwhelming. There may be a limit to how much suffering — and how much courage — you can hear about first-hand in a short space of time, even when delivered with remarkable calmness and modesty as was mostly the case. Indeed, one of the strange things about a gathering like this is how little anger and how much forgiveness you encounter. That said, there was outrage, especially in the presentation by Sophal Ear, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge killing fields, now a political scientist in California. His quiet fury was directed not so much at the regime that murdered his family and so many of his fellow countrymen but at those including Noam Chomsky who have defended the record of "Democratic Kampuchea" long after the truth was out. 

There is also surprising lightness and optimism to be found among these people whose lives — sometimes by choice — are so difficult or perilous. The Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez is essentially confined to her house, has been beaten up in the street and has to upload her postings by texting them to supporters who can get internet access. Yet her videoed message from Havana could hardly have been more cheerful.

Norway has long been friendly to Cuba, and for some Norwegians, watching her and then listening to longtime political prisoner Armando Valladares was not a comfortable experience. Even the representative of Amnesty Norway looked twitchy when Valladares reminded listeners that all dictatorships are bad, whether in Chile or Cuba, and noted that he had been in prison for 18 years before Amnesty even recognised that there were political prisoners in Cuba and adopted his case.

At the first forum last year, a Norwegian author shocked me by asking if it was true that the forum was organised by "American Jews". The agenda in front of us included speeches by a Turkish Kurd, a dissident from Uzbekistan and Greg Mortenson, the author of Three Cups of Tea. Then I realised that what made her sources suspicious of OFF was that it was not devoted to the usual suspects. As a local journalist explained to me, in Norway talk of human rights violations begins and ends with Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. 

There is also the fact that Norway tends to be nervous and politically correct when it comes even to mentioning human rights violations in the Muslim world or in Islamic communities at home. OFF has no such bashfulness. As the North African human rights activist Nasser Weddady told me: "They are a new scene. They are very young and yet they have a real understanding of the challenges of human rights in the Muslim world. They're not implicitly saying that Muslims are barbaric and backward and not be held to equal standards. They actually care about these nascent civil societies in places like Yemen, Sudan and Mauritania that no one pays much attention to. And that's inspiring for people like me."