After the death of Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, congressman, and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, his supporters founded the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice. The foundation, which is distinct from the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, defines its mission to “carry the noble banner of human rights to every corner of the world.”
It has failed.
Every year, the Lantos Foundation awards a human rights prize. Seldom does it break new ground. Instead, as with many similar groups, it bestows the honor on those in the spotlight who have received other awards, big names whom the glitterati will recognize and then open their checkbooks. It was perhaps in this spirit that, in 2011, the foundation awarded its prize to Paul Rusesabagina, who catapulted to fame after the 2004 Hollywood film Hotel Rwanda. Perhaps honoring Rusesabagina made sense at the time: President George W. Bush had awarded the hotelier the Presidential Medal of Freedom. That same year, Rusesabagina received the Wallenberg Medal and the National Civil Rights Museum Freedom Award.
The problem is that this spotlight and adulation sparked in Rusesabagina first ambition and then frustration. He wanted power, and failing to receive it democratically, he pursued power by other means. The evidence is damning. Rusesabagina embraced violence. His statements were not mere polemics. He channeled funds to designated groups that subsequently staged terrible terror attacks. They targeted not Rwandan officials or the military, but farmsteads, villages, and buses, where they slaughtered unarmed innocents.
In August 2020, Rwanda’s security service tricked Rusesabagina onto a plane destined for Rwanda. Upon its arrival, it arrested Rusesabagina. His trial is ongoing.
Enter Katrina Lantos Swett, Lantos’s daughter and president of the Lantos Foundation. Earlier this month, she demanded Magnitsky Act sanctions to punish those involved in Rusesabagina’s arrest. Her logic, however, betrays everything for which her father stood. Not only does Swett dismiss the evidence, which includes public speeches in which Rusesabagina endorsed terror groups and Western Union receipts showing Rusesabagina personally channeling funds to those groups, but she also states that the charges against Rusesabagina “are immaterial to this indisputable fact: Paul Rusesabagina was brought to Rwanda illegally under international law.”
She is wrong. There are many precedents confirmed by top human rights courts in which deception tactics used to bring suspects to justice have been deemed lawful and questions about the tactics of detention deemed immaterial at subsequent trial.
Lantos often spoke about how Adolf Eichmann, a high Nazi official responsible for war crimes, came to Hungary in 1944 to organize the liquidation of that country’s Jewish community. Lantos ended up in a labor camp from which he twice escaped, finally making it to a safe house organized by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, whom the Soviets subsequently disappeared. On May 11, 1960, an Israeli intelligence team kidnapped Eichmann in Buenos Aires and returned him to Israel to face trial. Does Swett really believe that Eichmann’s kidnapping invalidated the charges against him or, for that matter, that the kidnapping was the wrong thing to do? That is where she now positions the Lantos Foundation.
Swett’s castigation of Rwandan President Paul Kagame for criticizing Rusesabagina is also not relevant. Is President Joe Biden’s call for “the right verdict” reason to put aside Derek Chauvin’s subsequent murder conviction?
Sometimes, bad people win awards. Comedian Bill Cosby won several awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, before his eventual conviction on rape charges. Few suggested that Hollywood accolades or presidential honors should exculpate Cosby. Likewise, the Norwegian Nobel Committee bestowed the Nobel Peace Prize upon Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, unaware that he might subsequently become one of the continent’s greatest war criminals. For the committee, Abiy might now be an embarrassment, but it does not work to save its reputation at the expense of denying his crimes.
None of this is to suggest that Rusesabagina’s trial is perfect. There is room for improvement in Rwanda’s justice system. The American Bar Association highlights some places for reform, especially to take “care in distinguishing between non-privileged and privileged materials.”
Still, human rights groups delegitimize themselves when they prioritize politics and ego above precedent and principle. Dislike of Kagame is no reason to excuse terror, just as dislike of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should never have been reason to absolve Hamas. Unfortunately, by confusing facts and feelings in Rwanda’s trial, the Lantos Foundation has dealt a blow to itself and to human rights advocacy more broadly.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
