Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission

What it is: The Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission is a bipartisan body of the United States House of Representatives that promotes and defends internationally recognised human rights. Membership is free and open to every member of the House. It is named for Tom Lantos, a California Democrat who was the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress, from 1980 to 2008.

How it began: Lantos and John Edward Porter founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in 1983. Lantos died on 11 February 2008, and on 24 September 2008 the House adopted H. Res. 1451 unanimously, turning the caucus into a full body of the House with his name.

Co-chairs, in order: James P. McGovern (Democrat, Massachusetts) has been a co-chair since 2008. His Republican partners were Frank R. Wolf until Wolf retired at the end of 2014, Joseph R. Pitts from 2015, and Randy Hultgren from 2017. The Commission's page now lists McGovern and Christopher H. Smith of New Jersey.

Key moments

• 30 September 2014: a Commission event titled "Thirty Years of Impunity: The November 1984 Anti-Sikh Pogroms in India", hosted by McGovern and Wolf in the Rayburn House Office Building. It opened with the film The Widow Colony and went on to a panel of the author Manoj Mitta, the filmmakers Harpreet Kaur and Manmeet Singh of Sach Productions and Sukhman Singh Dhami of Ensaaf, with Rajdeep Singh of the Sikh Coalition as moderator. The Commission's notice said an estimated 3,000 Sikhs were massacred in Delhi in the first week of November 1984 and that, according to eyewitnesses and Indian human rights activists, officials organised the killings and police helped. A SikhNet report, quoting the Sikh Coalition's executive director, called it the first-ever congressional briefing on the 1984 massacres and said it took place while Narendra Modi was in Washington. We could not confirm "first-ever" independently.
• February 2024: the Commission's earlier hearing on transnational repression, named in its 2025 notice.
• 24 June 2025: a hearing titled "Transnational Repression: Trends and Policy Approaches", with country cases including Pakistan, India, Hong Kong and China. Witnesses came from Freedom House, the Open Dialogue Foundation, Fact Focus, Hindus for Human Rights and Amnesty International Hong Kong Overseas, with the journalist Paulo Figueiredo. Statements for the record came from Sikhs for Justice, the Sikh Coalition and Shiromani Akali Dal (Amritsar) America. The Sikh Coalition's statement describes a November 2023 US Justice Department indictment over a plot to kill a Sikh American activist and says a 2024 indictment tied it to an Indian intelligence officer. That is the Coalition's account of the filings.

Where it stands: The Commission is active in the 119th Congress. Its pages record events, witnesses and submissions, not findings of its own on 1984 or on transnational repression.