ICRC appoints a new member to governing body

Geneva (ICRC) – At its meeting on 27 April, the Assembly of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) appointed Ms Samia Hurst-Majno as its newest member.

She will take up her functions in June. This brings the membership of the ICRC Assembly to 20.

Samia Hurst-Majno was born in 1971. She is a professor of biomedical ethics at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva, where she chairs the Institute for Ethics, History and the Department of Community Health and Medicine. She studied medicine and specialized in internal medicine at the University of Geneva, then trained in bioethics at the Department of Bioethics of the US National Institutes of Health.

She has been a clinical ethics consultant to the Geneva University Hospitals since 2003, served on the Central Ethics Committee of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences from 2008 to 2012, and as chair of the Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues group and vice-chair of the Swiss National COVID-19 Science Task Force from 2020 to 2022. She is a member of the Senate at the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences and the Swiss National Advisory Commission on Biomedical Ethics, and vice-president of the executive committee of the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS).

Her research focuses on ethical issues arising in clinical practice, health care systems, and public health, with a particular focus on the protection of vulnerable persons. Her definition of vulnerability was integrated into the Declaration of Helsinki 2013, and into the CIOMS international guidelines for health-related research involving humans in 2015.

The Assembly, composed of between 15 and 25 members of Swiss nationality, is the supreme governing body of the ICRC. It oversees all the ICRC's activities, decides the institutional strategy, adopts major policy documents and approves the organization's objectives and budgets.