Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission

The Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission (TLHRC) is a bipartisan body of the United States House of Representatives.

[6][7] The Congressional Human Rights Caucus was founded in 1983 by Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, and John Porter, an Illinois Republican.

[11][12] Charm Tong spoke with Bush about war rape and other women's rights issues in her home of Shan State.

[11] The Irrawaddy wrote in December of that year that lobbyists were attributing Bush's subsequent "outspokenness on Burma" to "the Charm Tong Effect".

[13][14] In 2006, the caucus held hearings on the alleged collaboration of Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Cisco with Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China.

During the run-up to the war, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus hosted a young Kuwaiti woman identified only as "Nurse Nayirah", who told of horrific abuses by Iraqi soldiers, including the killing of Kuwaiti babies by taking them out of their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold floor of the hospital.

Bush repeated the story at least ten times in the following weeks,[17] and Lantos himself argued that Nayirah's account of the atrocities helped to stir American opinion in favor of participation in the Gulf War.

[20] Asked about his having allowed the girl to give testimony without identifying herself, and without her story having been corroborated, Lantos replied, "The notion that any of the witnesses brought to the caucus through the Kuwaiti Embassy would not be credible did not cross my mind...

"[20] Lantos and John R. MacArthur, the foremost critic of the Nayirah issue, each had op-eds in The New York Times, in which each accused the other of distortion.

[22] The New York Times condemned Lantos's "lack of candor and lapse of judgment" in presenting her testimony without giving these facts as context, and called for a hearing by the House Ethics Committee.