H. Res. 296 
In the House of Representatives, U. S., 
October 29, 2019. 
Whereas the United States has a proud history of recognizing 
and condemning the Armenian Genocide, the killing of 
1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire from 
1915 to 1923, and providing relief to the survivors of the 
campaign of genocide against Armenians, Greeks, Assyr-
ians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites, and other 
Christians; 
Whereas the Honorable Henry Morgenthau, United States 
Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916, 
organized and led protests by officials of many countries 
against what he described as the empire’s ‘‘campaign of 
race extermination’’, and was instructed on July 16, 
1915, by United States Secretary of State Robert 
Lansing that the ‘‘Department approves your procedure 
* * * to stop Armenian persecution’’; 
Whereas President Woodrow Wilson encouraged the forma-
tion of the Near East Relief, chartered by an Act of Con-
gress, which raised $116,000,000 (over $2,500,000,000 
in 2019 dollars) between 1915 and 1930, and the Senate 
adopted resolutions condemning these massacres; 
Whereas Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term ‘‘genocide’’ in 
1944, and who was the earliest proponent of the United 
Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment
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of Genocide, invoked the Armenian case as a definitive 
example of genocide in the 20th century; 
Whereas, as displayed in the United States Holocaust Memo-
rial Museum, Adolf Hitler, on ordering his military com-
manders to attack Poland without provocation in 1939, 
dismissed objections by saying ‘‘[w]ho, after all, speaks 
today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’’, setting the 
stage for the Holocaust; 
Whereas the United States has officially recognized the Ar-
menian Genocide, through the United States Govern-
ment’s May 28, 1951, written statement to the Inter-
national Court of Justice regarding the Convention on 
the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Geno-
cide, through President Ronald Reagan’s Proclamation 
No. 4838 on April 22, 1981, and by House Joint Resolu-
tion 148, adopted on April 8, 1975, and House Joint 
Resolution 247, adopted on September 10, 1984; and 
Whereas the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention 
Act of 2018 (Public Law 115–441) establishes that 
atrocities prevention represents a United States national 
interest, and affirms that it is the policy of the United 
States to pursue a United States Government-wide strat-
egy to identify, prevent, and respond to the risk of atroc-
ities by ‘‘strengthening diplomatic response and the effec-
tive use of foreign assistance to support appropriate tran-
sitional justice measures, including criminal account-
ability, for past atrocities’’: Now, therefore, be it 
Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Represent-
atives that it is the policy of the United States to— 
(1) commemorate the Armenian Genocide through 
official recognition and remembrance;
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(2) reject efforts to enlist, engage, or otherwise as-
sociate the United States Government with denial of the 
Armenian Genocide or any other genocide; and 
(3) encourage education and public understanding 
of the facts of the Armenian Genocide, including the 
United States role in the humanitarian relief effort, and 
the relevance of the Armenian Genocide to modern-day 
crimes against humanity. 
Attest: 
Clerk.