Solferino, Henry Dunant and the foundation of the ICRC , author of
A Memory of Solferino Up until the middle of the 19th century, there were no organized and well-established army
nursing systems for casualties and no safe and protected institutions to accommodate and treat those who were wounded on the battlefield. In June 1859, the Swiss businessman
Henry Dunant travelled to Italy to meet French emperor
Napoléon III with the intention of discussing difficulties in conducting business in Algeria, at that time occupied by France. When he arrived in the small Italian town of
Solferino on the evening of 24 June, he witnessed the aftermath of the
Battle of Solferino, an engagement in the
Second Italian War of Independence. In a single day, about 40,000 soldiers on both sides died or were left wounded on the field. Henry Dunant was shocked by the terrible aftermath of the battle, the suffering of the wounded soldiers, and the near-total lack of medical attendance and basic care. He completely abandoned the original intent of his trip and for several days he devoted himself to helping with the treatment and care for the wounded. He succeeded in organizing an overwhelming level of relief assistance by motivating the local population to aid without discrimination. Back in his home in
Geneva, he decided to write a book titled
A Memory of Solferino which he published with his own money in 1862. He sent copies of the book to leading political and military figures throughout Europe. In addition to penning a vivid description of his experiences in Solferino in 1859, he explicitly advocated the formation of national voluntary relief organizations to help nurse wounded soldiers in the case of war. In addition, he called for the development of international treaties to guarantee the neutrality and protection of those wounded on the battlefield as well as medics and field hospitals. , 1864 On 9 February 1863, the
Geneva Society for Public Welfare held a meeting where it was decided to give serious consideration to the suggestions made in Dunant's book and appointed five of its members to form a Sub-committee charged with the preparation of a Memorandum on these matters for submission to the Welfare Congress to be held in Berlin in September 1863. The members of this Sub-committee, aside from Dunant himself, were
Gustave Moynier, lawyer and chairman of the Geneva Society for Public Welfare; physician
Louis Appia, who had significant experience working as a field surgeon; Appia's friend and colleague
Théodore Maunoir, from the
Geneva Hygiene and Health Commission; and
Guillaume-Henri Dufour, a
Swiss Army general of great renown. Eight days later, on 17 February 1863, the five men held the first meeting of the Sub-committee and decided the Sub-committee should declare itself constituted a "Permanent International Committee", which would thus continue to exist as an "International Committee for Relief of Wounded in the event of War" after its mandate from the Geneva Society for Public Welfare had expired. Among other activities, the Committee organized an international conference in Geneva in October (26–29) 1863 to develop possible measures to improve medical services on the battlefield. The conference was attended by 36 individuals: eighteen official delegates from national governments, six delegates from other non-governmental organizations, seven non-official foreign delegates, and the five members of the committee. The states and kingdoms represented by official delegates were
Grand Duchy of Baden,
Kingdom of Bavaria,
Second French Empire,
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland,
Kingdom of Hanover,
Grand Duchy of Hesse,
Kingdom of Italy,
Kingdom of the Netherlands,
Austrian Empire,
Kingdom of Prussia,
Russian Empire,
Kingdom of Saxony,
United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway, and
Spanish Empire. Among the proposals written in the final resolutions of the conference, adopted on 29 October 1863, were: • The foundation of national relief societies for wounded soldiers; • Neutrality and protection for wounded soldiers; • The utilization of volunteer forces for relief assistance on the battlefield; • The organization of additional conferences to enact these concepts in legally binding international treaties; and • The introduction of a common distinctive protection symbol for medical personnel in the field, namely a white armlet bearing a red cross, honouring the history of neutrality of Switzerland and of its own Swiss organizers by reversing the Swiss flag's colours. Only one year later, the Swiss government invited the governments of all European countries, as well as the United States, Brazil, and Mexico, to attend an official diplomatic conference. Sixteen countries sent a total of twenty-six delegates to Geneva. On 22 August 1864, the conference adopted the
First Geneva Convention "for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field". Representatives of 12 states and kingdoms signed the convention: • • • • • • • • • • • • The convention contained ten articles, establishing for the first time legally binding rules guaranteeing neutrality and protection for wounded soldiers, field medical personnel, and specific humanitarian institutions in an armed conflict. Furthermore, the convention defined two specific requirements for recognition of a national relief society by the International Committee: • The national society must be recognized by its own national government as a relief society according to the convention, and • The national government of the respective country must be a state party to the Geneva Convention. Directly following the establishment of the Geneva Convention, the first national societies were founded in Belgium, Denmark, France,
Oldenburg, Prussia, Spain, and Württemberg. Also in 1864, Louis Appia and
Charles van de Velde, a captain of the
Dutch Army, became the first independent and neutral delegates to work under the symbol of the Red Cross in an armed conflict. Three years later in 1867, the first
International Conference of National Aid Societies for the Nursing of the War Wounded was convened. (Denmark) in 1864; jointly erected in 1989 by the national Red Cross societies of Denmark and
Germany Also in 1867, Henry Dunant was forced to declare bankruptcy due to business failures in Algeria, partly because he had neglected his business interests during his tireless activities for the International Committee. The controversy surrounding Dunant's business dealings and the resulting negative public opinion, combined with an ongoing conflict with Gustave Moynier, led to Dunant's expulsion from his position as a member and secretary. He was charged with fraudulent bankruptcy and a warrant for his arrest was issued. Thus, he was forced to leave Geneva and never returned to his home city. In the following years, national societies were founded in nearly every country in Europe. The project resonated well with patriotic sentiments that were on the rise in the late-nineteenth-century, and national societies were often encouraged as signifiers of national moral superiority. In 1876, the committee adopted the name "International Committee of the Red Cross" (ICRC), which is still its official designation today. Five years later, the
American Red Cross was founded through the efforts of
Clara Barton. More and more countries signed the Geneva Convention and began to respect it in practice during armed conflicts. In a rather short period of time, the Red Cross gained huge momentum as an internationally respected movement, and the national societies became increasingly popular as a venue for volunteer work. When the first
Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 1901, the
Norwegian Nobel Committee opted to give it jointly to Henry Dunant and
Frédéric Passy, a leading international pacifist. More significant than the honour of the prize itself, the official congratulation from the International Committee of the Red Cross marked the overdue rehabilitation of Henry Dunant and represented a tribute to his key role in the formation of the Red Cross. Dunant died nine years later in the small Swiss health resort of
Heiden. Only two months earlier his long-standing adversary Gustave Moynier had also died, leaving a mark in the history of the committee as its longest-serving President ever. In 1906, the 1864 Geneva Convention was revised for the first time. One year later, the
Hague Convention X, adopted at the Second International Peace Conference in
The Hague, extended the scope of the Geneva Convention to naval warfare. Shortly before the beginning of the First World War in 1914, 50 years after the foundation of the ICRC and the adoption of the first Geneva Convention, there were already 45 national relief societies throughout the world. The movement had extended itself beyond Europe and North America to Central and South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, El Salvador, Uruguay, Venezuela), Asia (the Republic of China, Japan, Korea,
Siam), and Africa (South Africa).
World War I With the outbreak of
World War I, the ICRC found itself confronted with enormous challenges which it could only handle by working closely with the national Red Cross societies. Red Cross nurses from around the world, including the United States and Japan, came to support the medical services of the armed forces of the European countries involved in the war. On 15 October 1914, immediately after the start of the war, the ICRC set up its International Prisoners-of-War (
POW) Agency, which had about 1,200 mostly volunteer staff members by the end of 1914. By the end of the war, the Agency had transferred about 20 million letters and messages, 1.9 million parcels, and about 18 million
Swiss francs in monetary donations to POWs of all affected countries. Furthermore, due to the intervention of the Agency, about 200,000 prisoners were exchanged between the warring parties, released from captivity and returned to their home country. The organizational card index of the Agency accumulated about 7 million records from 1914 to 1923, each card representing an individual prisoner or missing person. The card index led to the identification of about 2 million POWs and the ability to contact their families, as part of the
Restoring Family Links effort of the organization. The complete index is on loan today from the ICRC to the
International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva. The right to access the index is still strictly restricted to the ICRC. During the entire war, the ICRC monitored warring parties' compliance with the Geneva Conventions of the 1907 revision and forwarded complaints about violations to the respective country. When
chemical weapons were used in this war for the first time in history, the ICRC vigorously protested against this new type of warfare. Even without having a mandate from the Geneva Conventions, the ICRC tried to ameliorate the suffering of civil populations. In territories that were officially designated as "occupied territories," the ICRC could assist the civilian population on the basis of the
Hague Convention's "Laws and Customs of War on Land" of 1907. This convention was also the legal basis for the ICRC's work for prisoners of war. In addition to the work of the International Prisoner-of-War Agency as described above this included inspection visits to
POW camps. A total of 524 camps throughout Europe were visited by 41 delegates from the ICRC until the end of the war. Between 1916 and 1918, the ICRC published a number of
postcards with scenes from the POW camps. The pictures showed the prisoners in day-to-day activities such as the distribution of letters from home. The intention of the ICRC was to provide the families of the prisoners with some hope and solace and to alleviate their uncertainties about the fate of their loved ones. After the end of the war, the ICRC organized the return of about 420,000 prisoners to their home countries. In 1920, the task of repatriation was handed over to the newly founded
League of Nations, which appointed the Norwegian diplomat and scientist
Fridtjof Nansen as its "High Commissioner for Repatriation of the War Prisoners". His legal mandate was later extended to support and care for war refugees and displaced persons when his office became that of the League of Nations "
High Commissioner for Refugees". Nansen, who invented the
Nansen passport for stateless refugees and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922, appointed two delegates from the ICRC as his deputies. A year before the end of the war, the ICRC received the 1917 Nobel Peace Prize for its outstanding wartime work. It was the only Nobel Peace Prize awarded in the period from 1914 to 1918. After the war ended,
Henry Pomeroy Davison, who had been Chairman of the War Council of the
American Red Cross pressed for the creation of an international organization to coordinate the work of the different national Red Cross societies. Based on his recommendation, the
League of Red Cross Societies was founded on 15 May 1919, by the societies of Great Britain, France, Japan, Italy, and the United States. Davison, wanted the League of Red Cross Societies to supersede the ICRC in controlling the Red Cross action in international affairs. He argued that: It should be in reality, and not merely in name an International Committee, a Committee on which there will be representatives from all countries, instead of, as at present, a committee consisting of amiable but somewhat ineffective Geneva gentlemen. That which calls itself "international" has grown rather provincial… New blood, new methods, a new and more comprehensive outlook, these things are necessary. The League was established in 1919 with Davison as its chairman. However, "Swiss aloofness or unilateralism was hard to overcome", and the relationship between the ICRC and the League became, and remained, a problem for years to come. The untimely death of Davison in 1922 after an operation will undoubtedly have had an adverse impact on the league's ability to counter what he saw as Swiss intransigence. In 1923, the Committee adopted a change in its policy regarding the selection of new members. Until then, only citizens from the city of Geneva could serve in the committee. This limitation was expanded to include Swiss citizens. As a direct consequence of World War I, an additional protocol to the Geneva Convention was adopted in 1925 which outlawed the use of suffocating or poisonous gases and biological agents as weapons. Four years later, the original Convention was revised and the second Geneva Convention "relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War" was established. The events of World War I and the respective activities of the ICRC significantly increased the reputation and authority of the Committee among the international community and led to an extension of its competencies. As early as in 1934, a draft proposal for an additional convention for the protection of the civil population during an armed conflict was adopted by the International Red Cross Conference. Unfortunately, most governments had little interest in implementing this convention, and it was thus prevented from entering into force before the beginning of World War II.
Chaco War In the
Interwar period, Bolivia and Paraguay were disputing possession of the
Gran Chaco – a desert region between the two countries. The dispute escalated into a
full-scale conflict in 1932. During the war the ICRC visited 18,000 Bolivian prisoners of war and 2,500 Paraguayan detainees. With the help of the ICRC both countries made improvements to the conditions of the detainees.
World War II , Poland, 1940 The most reliable primary source on the role of the Red Cross during World War II are the three volumes of the "Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on its activities during the second world war (September 1, 1939 – June 30, 1947)" written by the International Committee of the Red Cross itself. The report can be read online. The legal basis of the work of the ICRC during World War II was the
Geneva Conventions (1929) revision, as well as the
Convention relating to the International Status of Refugees, of 28 October 1933. The activities of the committee were similar to those during World War I: visiting and monitoring POW camps, organizing relief assistance for civilian populations, and administering the exchange of messages regarding prisoners and missing persons. By the end of the war, 179 delegates had conducted 12,750 visits to POW camps in 41 countries. The Central Information Agency on Prisoners-of-War (
Zentralauskunftsstelle für Kriegsgefangene) had a staff of 3,000, the card index tracking prisoners contained 45 million cards, and 120 million messages were exchanged by the Agency. One major obstacle was that the
Nazi-controlled
German Red Cross refused to cooperate with the Geneva statutes including blatant violations such as the deportation of Jews from Germany and the
mass murders conducted in the
concentration camps run by the German government. Moreover, two other main parties to the conflict, the
Soviet Union and Japan, were not party to the 1929 Geneva Conventions and were not legally required to follow the rules of the conventions. During the war, the ICRC failed to obtain an agreement with Nazi Germany about the treatment of detainees in concentration camps, and it eventually abandoned applying pressure to avoid disrupting its work with POWs. There was no public condemnation of treatment in concentration camps, and a proposed 1942 appeal on the conduct of hostilities was abandoned. In addition, the ICRC failed to develop a response to reliable information about the extermination camps and the mass killing of European Jews. The ICRC considers this its greatest failure in its history. , delegate of the ICRC, visiting POWs in
Nazi Germany Swiss historian Jean-Claude Favez, who conducted an 8-year review of the Red Cross records, says that even though the Red Cross knew by November 1942 about the Nazi's annihilation plans for the Jews – and even discussed it with U.S. officials – the group did nothing to inform the public, maintaining silence even in the face of pleas by Jewish groups. Because the Red Cross was based in Geneva and largely funded by the Swiss government, it was sensitive to Swiss wartime attitudes and policies. In October 1942, the Swiss government and the Red Cross' board of members vetoed a proposal by several Red Cross board members to condemn the persecution of civilians by the Nazis. For the rest of the war, the Red Cross took its cues from Switzerland in avoiding acts of opposition or confrontation with the Nazis. in 1944 On 12 March 1945, ICRC President Jacob Burckhardt received a message from SS General
Ernst Kaltenbrunner accepting the ICRC's demand to allow delegates to visit the concentration camps. This agreement was bound by the condition that these delegates would have to stay in the camps until the end of the war. Ten delegates, among them
Louis Haefliger (
Mauthausen Camp),
Paul Dunant (
Theresienstadt Camp) and
Victor Maurer (
Dachau Camp), accepted the assignment and visited the camps. Louis Haefliger prevented the forceful eviction or blasting of Mauthausen-Gusen by alerting American troops, thereby saving the lives of about 60,000 inmates. His actions were condemned by the ICRC because they were deemed as acting unduly on his own authority and risking the ICRC's neutrality. Only in 1990 was his reputation finally rehabilitated by ICRC President
Cornelio Sommaruga. In 1944, the ICRC received its second Nobel Peace Prize. As in World War I, it received the only Peace Prize awarded during the main period of war, 1939 to 1945. At the end of the war, the ICRC worked with national Red Cross societies to organize relief assistance to those countries most severely affected. In 1948, the Committee published a report reviewing its war-era activities from 1 September 1939 to 30 June 1947. Since January 1996, the ICRC archive for this period has been open to academic and public research.
Rest of the 20th century In December 1948 the ICRC was invited, along with the
IFRC and
AFSC, by the United Nations to take part in a $32 million emergency relief programme working with
Palestinian refugees. The ICRC was given responsibility for the areas that are now the
West Bank and Israel. On 12 August 1949, further revisions to the existing two Geneva Conventions were adopted. An additional convention "for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea", now called the second Geneva Convention, was brought under the Geneva Convention umbrella as a successor to the
1907 Hague Convention X. The 1929 Geneva convention "relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War" may have been the second Geneva Convention from a historical point of view (because it was actually formulated in Geneva), but after 1949 it came to be called the third Convention because it came later chronologically than the Hague Convention. Reacting to the experience of World War II, the
Fourth Geneva Convention, a new Convention "relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War," was established. Also, the additional protocols of 8 June 1977 were intended to make the conventions apply to internal conflicts such as civil wars. Today, the four conventions and their added protocols contain more than 600 articles, a remarkable expansion when compared to the mere 10 articles in the first 1864 convention. In celebration of its centennial in 1963, the ICRC, together with the
League of Red Cross Societies, received its third Nobel Peace Prize. Since 1993, non-Swiss individuals have been allowed to serve as Committee delegates abroad, a task which was previously restricted to Swiss citizens. Indeed, since then, the share of staff without Swiss citizenship has increased to about 35%. On 16 October 1990, the
UN General Assembly decided to grant the ICRC
observer status for its assembly sessions and sub-committee meetings, the first observer status given to a private organization. The resolution was jointly proposed by 138 member states and introduced by the Italian ambassador,
Vieri Traxler, in memory of the organization's origins in the Battle of Solferino. An agreement with the Swiss government signed on 19 March 1993, affirmed the already long-standing policy of full independence of the committee from any possible interference by Switzerland. The agreement protects the full sanctity of all ICRC property in Switzerland including its headquarters and archive, grants members and staff legal immunity, exempts the ICRC from all taxes and fees, guarantees the protected and duty-free transfer of goods, services, and money, provides the ICRC with secure communication privileges at the same level as foreign embassies, and simplifies Committee travel in and out of Switzerland. The ICRC continued its activities throughout the 1990s. It broke its customary media silence when it denounced the
Rwandan genocide in 1994. It struggled to prevent the crimes that happened in and around
Srebrenica in 1995 but admitted, "We must acknowledge that despite our efforts to help thousands of civilians forcibly expelled from the town and despite the dedication of our colleagues on the spot, the ICRC's impact on the unfolding of the tragedy was extremely limited." It went public once again in 2007 to decry "major human rights abuses" by Burma's military government including forced labour, starvation, and murder of men, women, and children.
The Holocaust memorial By taking part in the 1995 ceremony to commemorate the liberation of the
Auschwitz concentration camp, the President of the ICRC,
Cornelio Sommaruga, sought to show that the organization was fully aware of the gravity of
The Holocaust and the need to keep the memory of it alive, so as to prevent any repetition of it. He paid tribute to all those who had suffered or lost their lives during the war and publicly regretted the past mistakes and shortcomings of the Red Cross with regard to the victims of the concentration camps. In 2002, an ICRC official outlined some of the lessons the organization has learned from the failure: • from a legal point of view, the work that led to the adoption of the Geneva Convention relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war; • from an ethical point of view, the adoption of the declaration of the Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, building on the distinguished work of
Max Huber and
Jean Pictet, to prevent any more abuses such as those that occurred within the movement after
Hitler rose to power in 1933; • on a political level, the ICRC's relationship with Switzerland was redesigned to ensure its independence; • with a view to keeping memories alive, the ICRC accepted, in 1955, to take over the direction of the
International Tracing Service where records from concentration camps are maintained; • finally, to establish the historical facts of the case, the ICRC invited Jean-Claude Favez to carry out an independent investigation of its activities on behalf of the victims of Nazi persecution, and gave him unfettered access to the
ICRC archives relating to this period; out of concern for transparency, the ICRC also decided to give all other historians access to its archives dating back more than 50 years; having gone over the conclusions of Favez's work, the ICRC acknowledged its past failings and expressed its regrets in this regard. In an official statement made on 27 January 2005, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the ICRC stated: Auschwitz also represents the greatest failure in the history of the ICRC, aggravated by its lack of decisiveness in taking steps to aid the victims of Nazi persecution. This failure will remain part of the ICRC's memory, as will the courageous acts of individual ICRC delegates at the time.
Rules for cyberwarfare On 4 October 2023 the committee issued a
set of rules for civilian hackers to abide by. ==Staff fatalities==