WASHINGTON (ABP) — One of Congress' staunchest defenders of international religious freedom has died.
Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) died Feb. 11 at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., reportedly of complications from esophageal cancer. The 80-year-old Lantos had represented suburban San Francisco in the House since 1981.
Lantos was the only Holocaust survivor in Congress. At the time of his death, he served as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He was also a co-founder and co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.
The congressman used his office to draw attention to human-rights issues, especially religious freedom. Lantos focused on abuses of minority ethnic and religious groups in Sudan, Saudi Arabia and China, to name a few.
“Despite the many demands on the time and attention of such a senior member of Congress, victims of human-rights abuses could consistently rely upon Rep. Lantos to be an advocate for freedom,” said Michael Cromartie, chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, in a statement mourning Lantos' death. “Rep. Lantos never hesitated to speak on behalf of those with no political voice.”
Lantos pushed for the 1998 legislation that created the commission, an independent government agency that monitors and reports on religious-liberty conditions worldwide. It also created, for the first time, an ambassador-level State Department position with a focus on freedom of conscience.
More recently, Lantos turned his attention to the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. In 2006, he was one of four members of Congress arrested at the Sudanese Embassy in Washington for protesting that government's role in the crisis.
Lantos was born to a Hungarian Jewish family in Budapest in 1928. As a teenager, he fought against the Nazis as part of the Hungarian resistance to German occupation. He was eventually captured but escaped a concentration camp before fleeing to the United States.
At a Feb. 14 memorial service in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, colleagues and dignitaries honored Lantos. “For Tom, freedom was not just an abstract ideal,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, according to the Associated Press. “I can see him look at us with those piercing-yet-compassionate eyes and say, ‘All right, you can pause for a moment to remember me, but then you must resume the struggle.'”
After arriving in the United States, Lantos used scholarships provided by Jewish organizations to attend college, eventually earning a Ph.D. from the University of California. He worked as an economist and business advisor before being elected to Congress.
Lantos' death came only a month after his announcement that he would not seek re-election due to the cancer diagnosis.
“It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust and a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground could have received an education, raised a family and had the privilege of serving the last three decades of his life as a member of Congress,” Lantos said, in a statement announcing his decision to retire. “I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country.”
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