Editor’s Note: The Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual human-rights conference, took place from May 7 to 9, in the Norwegian capital. The previous parts of Jay Nordlinger’s journal are at the following links: I, II, III, IV, and V.

At a bright-and-early hour, there is a breakfast session at the Café Christiania. Brownies are available. I figure it’s only polite to eat one — or several. Thoughtfully, I leave the fruit, which looks delicious, to others.

We will hear four people discuss four “emblematic cases of political detention.” One of the speakers is Pavel Khodorkovsky, son of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the magnate who criticized the Russian government and found himself behind bars. He has been in prison since 2003.

His son, Pavel, is in his mid-twenties, I believe. He has spent much of his life campaigning for his father, and for a different kind of Russia. Surely, he never intended to spend his life this way. Funny, what happens to people.

When Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested, he asked his lawyer to deliver a message to Pavel: “Solzhenitsyn said, ‘Live not by lies.’ I am going to fight this. We need to tell the truth. And we need to turn Russia into a normal country.”

Pavel says that the Kremlin is “always trying to put blood on my father’s hands” — always accusing him of the worst deeds. He has gone through two show trials, says Pavel, and has endured prisons and labor camps.

Amnesty International has classified Khodorkovsky as a prisoner of conscience. And Pavel notes that some people have a hard time accepting that a man who was once so rich could be a political prisoner. Yet, it’s so.

“My father’s case set off the degradation of the rule of law in Russia,” says Pavel, “and his release can set off the revival of the rule of law.”

I can say with confidence that Mikhail Khodorkovsky would be very, very proud of the way his son has comported himself here in Norway. Every father should have such a son.

‐Nargess Tavassolian has a famous mother: Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human-rights lawyer who was the 2003 Nobel peace laureate. (Ebadi was a speaker at the Freedom Forum last year. For my piece on her in National Review, go here.) Nargess is a doctoral student and is speaking today about another Iranian woman who is a human-rights lawyer: Nasrin Sotoudeh. This lawyer is not free to move about. She is caught in the hell of Evin Prison.

I don’t know what kind of life Nargess Tavassolian wanted to have, or expected to have. But we can thank her for spending some of it speaking up for the likes of Nasrin Sotoudeh.

‐Jianli Yang could have had a big and comfortable academic career: He has a Ph.D. in math from Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in political economy from Harvard. He is terrifically intelligent and talented. And good. He has chosen to spend his life campaigning and arguing for a free, democratic China.

This morning, he is speaking about Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel peace laureate, and a prisoner of conscience. China is a great power, says Yang, or an emerging great power. Why are they so afraid of this one man — a quiet intellectual who helped produce the distinctly moderate Charter 08?

They know, probably, that right ideas can bring down a one-party dictatorship (with a gulag).

Yang says there are two Chinas. (A recent Democratic vice-presidential nominee talked about “two Americas”; Yang is much more convincing.) By “two Chinas,” he does not mean Taiwan and the mainland, he says.

The first China, he calls “China, Inc.” It is “a marriage of political elites and economic elites, plus co-opted intellectuals. This is the China that dazzles the world with its might and glory.” The other China is the “under-China” — the great majority of the country.

Like you, I bet, I have heard a great many people speak about China, and they have said many different things. When I listen to Jianli — as I’ve been doing for something like twelve years now — I think, “This has the ring of truth.”

‐Bjørn Engesland, the secretary-general of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, speaks for Ales Bialiatski. This town knows Bialiatski, or should: He was a speaker at the 2009 Freedom Forum. A Belarusian human-rights activist and intellectual, he is now in prison.

Engesland says that many told Bialiatski he ought to leave Belarus and stay abroad. Any Western country would have given him asylum, says Engesland. But Bialiatski’s response was: “I have done nothing wrong. Why should I have to leave home?”

He is now imprisoned with, and menaced by, common criminals. They always do this to the “politicals,” always. In every closed society I have ever heard about.

‐The session in the Christiania Theatre — not to be confused with the Café Christiania — begins with some playing by Simon Powis, a classical guitarist from Australia. His playing is sensitive, skilled, and musical. Can you ask for much more?

‐At the podium is Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian-American journalist. During protests in Cairo last November, she was arrested and detained. “They broke my arm and my hand,” she says, “but they sexually assaulted me too, and I always talk about that. I think it’s important.” In detention, she managed to send out a tweet: “Beaten, arrested, in Interior Ministry.” That, she says, is something that helped free her, after twelve hours.

During those hours, she repeatedly told officials that she had been sexually assaulted. (What she means exactly by this phrase, I don’t know. Is it a euphemism for rape? I don’t think so, but I’ll be damned if I’ll ask.) “I wanted them to feel the shame,” she says, “because the shame was not mine.”

She is obviously a very gutsy person, Mona Eltahawy. Twice here in the theater, she says that her hero and model is Emma Goldman. Ah, well. Some people wear Che Guevara T-shirts — and they know not what they do. (Some do, it’s true.) I’m not sure Eltahawy would like a world in which Emma Goldman’s ideas prevailed.

‐Andrew Feinstein, a South African writer and politico, speaks about the global arms trade, and condemns it. He makes many excellent and incontestable points. But, myself, I have always found arms rather neutral: employed for good or ill.

He says that “trade in weapons is less regulated than trade in bananas.” This makes me smile. It’s a good line — and I remember a piece that David Pryce-Jones wrote for NR years ago. It was about the “banana wars,” and EU regulatory fits.

If I have heard him correctly, Feinstein says that the United States has amassed more arms than the rest of the world combined. I’m glad. This has meant a lot to world freedom, and to world peace. NR once made a quip: Every year, the Nobel Peace Prize should go to the Pentagon, because the U.S. military is the world’s foremost guarantor of peace.

Even Barack Obama acknowledged something like this in his Nobel lecture (2009) — check it out.

Feinstein makes a point of saying that the U.S. armed the Mubarak government in Egypt, for decades. True. This, as you may remember, was a cost of the Egyptian-Israeli peace — which, though shaky now, has held for 33 years, and has been immensely important to the Middle East and to the world at large. Sometimes there are trade-offs in life. Nuances (dread word).

On a screen, Feinstein shows an explosion in Albania, and the results of that explosion. If I have understood him, an arms factory blew up, killing many people, including a little boy on a bicycle. A picture shows the bike in the wreckage.

You can make your points without such pictures — without manipulation of that type — but this is a style that a lot of people appreciate.

‐In Part V of this journal, I mentioned how ugly the U.S. embassy in Oslo is. Such a shame. The British embassy? Just as ugly. The standard black box. If that makes you feel any better (and it doesn’t, I know!).

Jay Nordlinger’s journal will continue tomorrow. To get his new book, Peace, They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Most Famous and Controversial Prize in the World, go here.