Tom Lantos was a Hungarian-born U.S. Congressman remembered for raising awareness and respect for human rights around the world. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1980 becoming the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in the Congress. In 1983 he co-founded and chaired the Congressional Human Rights Caucus renamed in his honour as the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. With articles authored by leading academics this Festschrift remembers Tom Lantos’s extensive human rights activism on the human rights themes he was passionately involved with around the world. The essays offer new insights on a range of topical human rights issues, such as human rights education, religious freedom, post-conflict justice, minority rights and identity politics.

Human rights refers to the concept of human beings as having universal rights, or status, regardless of legal jurisdiction, and likewise other localising factors, such as ethnicity and nationality. For many, the concept of "human rights" is based in religious principles. However, because a formal concept of human rights has not been universally accepted, the term has some degree of variance between its use in different local jurisdictions -- difference in both meaningful substance as well as in protocols for and styles of application. Ultimately the most general meaning of the term is one which can only apply universally, and hence the term "human rights" is often itself an appeal to such transcended principles, without basing such on existing legal concepts. The term "humanism" refers to the developing doctrine of such universally applicable values, and it is on the basic concept that human beings have innate rights, that more specific local legal concepts are often based. Within particular societies, "human rights" refers to standards of behaviour as accepted within their respective legal systems regarding 1) the well being of individuals, 2) the freedom and autonomy of individuals, and 3) the representation of the human interest in government. These rights commonly include the right to life, the right to an adequate standard of living, the prohibition of genocide, freedom from torture and other mistreatment, freedom of expression, freedom of movement, the right to self-determination, the right to education, and the right to participation in cultural and political life. These norms are based on the legal and political traditions of United Nations member states and are incorporated into international human rights instruments. This new book brings together the latest book literature centred on this crucial topic.

Nathan A. Kurz charts the fraught relationship between Jewish internationalism and international rights protection in the second half of the twentieth century. For nearly a century, Jewish lawyers and advocacy groups in Western Europe and the United States had pioneered forms of international rights protection, tying the defense of Jews to norms and rules that aspired to curb the worst behavior of rapacious nation-states. In the wake of the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel, however, Jewish activists discovered they could no longer promote the same norms, laws and innovations without fear they could soon apply to the Jewish state. Using previously unexamined sources, Nathan Kurz examines the transformation of Jewish internationalism from an effort to constrain the power of nation-states to one focused on cementing Israel's legitimacy and its status as a haven for refugees from across the Jewish diaspora.