Tom Lantos: A Champion of Human Rights
covering burma and southeast asia
Friday, March 29, 2024
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OBITUARY

Tom Lantos: A Champion of Human Rights


By THE IRRAWADDY and AP MARCH, 2008 - VOLUME 16 NO.3


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US  Congressman Tom Lantos of California, one of the best friends Burma ever had, died in February.

A prominent campaigner for democracy and human rights, the Hungarian-born California Democrat, who was the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress, died at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in Maryland. He was 80 years old. In January, he disclosed that he had cancer of the esophagus.

Lantos, who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was serving his 14th term in Congress. He had said he would not seek reelection in his northern California district, which includes the southwest portion of San Francisco.

US President George W Bush praised Lantos as a man of character and “a champion of human rights.”

Lantos worked tirelessly to strengthen US support for democracy and human rights in Burma. Most notably, he wrote the Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act of 2003, which imposed sanctions on Burma’s military regime, and the Block Burmese JADE (Junta’s Anti-Democratic Efforts) Act of 2007, which expanded targeted sanctions on the regime.

“The US Congress will not watch silently as the democratic will of the people of Burma is thwarted,” Lantos said in December 2007 after the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved his Block Burmese JADE Act and voted to award the Congressional Gold Medal to Burma’s detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

On Suu Kyi, he said, “Aung San Suu Kyi remains imprisoned. So do the people of Burma. We must do our part to carry her torch.”

Lantos was born to Jewish parents in Budapest and was 16 when the Nazis occupied Hungary in 1944. He survived by escaping twice from a forced labor camp, eventually coming under the protection of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who used his official status to save thousands of Hungarian Jews.

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