Bogotá (ICRC) – Although the fighting is abating between government forces and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People's Army (FARC-EP), the International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) is …
There is no longer any doubt about the importance of women's work for the ICRC, but it has not always been so. For decades women were either under-represented or relegated to particular tasks. An …
Considerable attention has focused recently on the destruction of historic monuments in many of the world's armed conflicts. What is however not so widely realized is that in the event of armed …
I draw my courage from the love I have for my son, and from the suffering of the many women who, like me, are searching for missing relatives. At 86, Angelica Mendoza, known by all as "Mama …
Fatuma and her family were living a difficult life in a Somali displacement camp about a year ago. Her children were frequently hungry. School was an unaffordable luxury. A year later, everything has …
Mauritius ratified the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) and the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) in 2015. While the country is unlikely to experience the consequences of armed conflict, Mauritius has …
Speech given by Peter Maurer, president of the ICRC, at the 31st session of the Human Rights Council. One of my first field missions as president of the International Committee of the Red Cross …
Humanity, impartiality, neutrality and independence are the guiding principles for humanitarian action for most organisations operating in complex emergencies. But how easy are they to put into …
Hundreds of thousands of displaced people in the Central African Republic (CAR) are still waiting to return home and resume normal life. Already severely weakened by the effects of the conflict , …
On 3 December 2015, the ICRC held a public conference in the Humanitarium to try to answer the following question: How can decoding the mechanisms at work in torturers help tackle the phenomenon …
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Created in 1863, the ICRC library, alongside the ICRC archives, provides an indispensable documentary reference on the organization itself and international humanitarian law.
International humanitarian law is based on a number of treaties, in particular the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols, and a series of other instruments.
Customary international humanitarian law consists of rules that come from "a general practice accepted as law" and that exist independent of treaty law.
