International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the evening of the 24th of June 1859, the Swiss businessman Jean-Henri Dunant arrived in the small Italian town of Solferino. He had come to meet the French emperor Napoleon III about business troubles in Algeria. Instead he walked into the aftermath of a battle. In a single day, about 40,000 soldiers on both sides had died or lay wounded across the field of the Battle of Solferino, an engagement in the Austro-Sardinian War. There was almost no medical attendance and almost no basic care. Dunant abandoned his business entirely. For several days he helped treat the wounded, organizing relief with local villagers to aid them without discrimination. What grew from those few days is now a movement of roughly 16 million volunteers, members, and staff worldwide. This is the story of how one man's shock became a body of international law, why its protective symbol multiplied into a cross, a crescent, and a crystal, and how the same emblems meant to shield medics have, again and again, marked the people most exposed to harm.

• 2. A Memory Of Solferino

  ›

  Back in Geneva, Dunant put his own money into a book he titled A Memory of Solferino, published in 1862. He filled it with vivid descriptions of what he had seen on the field, and he made two demands of his readers. First, he urged nations to form voluntary relief organizations to nurse wounded soldiers in wartime, an idea he tied to Christian teaching about social responsibility. Second, he called for an international treaty to guarantee protection for medics and field hospitals. He sent copies to leading political and military figures across Europe and to anyone he believed could help.

  In 1863, Gustave Moynier, a Geneva lawyer and president of the Geneva Society for Public Welfare, received a copy and brought it to his society for discussion. That conversation produced an investigatory commission to test whether Dunant's ideas were feasible and to organize an international conference about them. The group later became known as the Committee of the Five. Besides Dunant and Moynier, it included the physician Louis Appia, who had worked as a field surgeon; Appia's colleague Theodore Maunoir of the Geneva Hygiene and Health Commission; and Guillaume-Henri Dufour, a Swiss army general of great renown. Eight days after forming, the five renamed themselves the International Committee for Relief to the Wounded, the seed of the body that in 1876 would adopt the name it still carries today, the International Committee of the Red Cross.

• 3. From Conference To Convention

  ›

  From the 26th to the 29th of October 1863, the committee convened an international conference in Geneva to improve medical services on the battlefield. Thirty-six people attended: eighteen official delegates from national governments, six from non-governmental organizations, seven non-official foreign delegates, and the five committee members. The final resolutions, adopted on the 29th of October, proposed founding national relief societies, granting neutrality and protection to the wounded, and using volunteer forces for battlefield relief. They also proposed a single distinctive emblem for medical personnel: a white armlet bearing a red cross.

  Only a year later, the Swiss government invited governments across Europe, plus the United States, the Empire of Brazil, and the Mexican Empire, to an official diplomatic conference. Sixteen countries sent 26 delegates to Geneva. On the 22nd of August 1864, they 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. Its ten articles created, for the first time, legally binding rules guaranteeing neutrality and protection for wounded soldiers, field medical personnel, and specific humanitarian institutions during armed conflict. The first national societies followed at once, in Belgium, Denmark, France, Oldenburg, Italy, Prussia, Spain, and Wurttemberg. That same year, Louis Appia and Charles van de Velde, a captain of the Dutch Army, became the first independent and neutral delegates to work under the Red Cross symbol in war.

• 4. The Founder's Fall

  ›

  In 1867, Jean-Henri Dunant was forced to declare bankruptcy. His business in Algeria had failed, partly because he had neglected it during his tireless work for the International Committee. The controversy over his dealings, combined with an ongoing conflict with Gustave Moynier, led to his expulsion as a member and secretary. He was charged with fraudulent bankruptcy, a warrant was issued for his arrest, and he left Geneva, never to return to his home city.

  When the first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 1901, the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave it jointly to Dunant and Frederic Passy, a leading international pacifist. The prize mattered less as an honor than as an overdue rehabilitation of the man who had set the movement in motion. Dunant died nine years later in the small Swiss health resort of Heiden. Only two months earlier, his long-standing adversary Moynier had also died, remembered as the committee's longest-serving president ever. By the eve of the First World War in 1914, fifty years after the committee's founding, there were already 45 national relief societies, reaching beyond Europe and North America into Central and South America, Asia, and Africa.

• 5. The Agency Of The Missing

  ›

  On the 15th of August 1914, days after the war began, the ICRC set up its International Prisoners-of-War Agency to trace POWs and reconnect them with their families. The Austrian writer and pacifist Stefan Zweig described the scene at the Geneva headquarters. Letters and telegrams poured into what he called the little House of the Red Cross, the only international rallying point that still remained. As he put it, by hundreds, by thousands, by tens of thousands the inquiries arrived in sackfuls. Nothing had been prepared. The Red Cross, he wrote, had no space, no organization, no system, and above all no helpers.

  By the end of that first year the Agency had some 1,200 volunteers working in the Musee Rath of Geneva, among them the French writer Romain Rolland, who donated half of his 1915 Nobel Prize for Literature to the cause. Most of the staff were women. Marguerite van Berchem, Marguerite Cramer, and Suzanne Ferriere held high positions as pioneers of gender equality in an organization dominated by men. By war's end the Agency had transferred about 20 million letters and messages, 1.9 million parcels, and about 18 million Swiss francs in donations to prisoners of all sides. Its intervention helped exchange roughly 200,000 prisoners. Its card index grew to about 7 million records between 1914 and 1923 and identified about 2 million POWs. The ICRC monitored compliance with the Geneva Conventions, visited 524 camps across Europe through 41 delegates, and protested vigorously when chemical weapons were used for the first time in history. In 1917 the ICRC received its first Nobel Peace Prize, the only one awarded between 1914 and 1918.

• 6. The Holocaust Reckoning

  ›

  As early as May 1944, the ICRC was criticized for its indifference to Jewish suffering and death, and that criticism only intensified once the full extent of the Holocaust became undeniable. One defense was that the organization sought to preserve its reputation as neutral and impartial by not interfering with what was viewed as a German internal matter. Its primary focus, it held, was prisoners of war whose countries had signed the Geneva Convention. The Nazi-controlled German Red Cross refused to cooperate with the Geneva statutes, and two major parties, the Soviet Union and Japan, were not party to the 1929 Conventions at all.

  Unable to win an agreement with Nazi Germany over concentration camp detainees, the ICRC eventually stopped applying pressure, later saying it did so to avoid disrupting its work with POWs. After November 1943 it gained permission to send parcels to detainees whose names and locations were known. Because receipts were often signed by other inmates, the ICRC registered about 105,000 detainees and delivered about 1.1 million parcels, primarily to Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbruck, and Sachsenhausen. The mission of Maurice Rossel, an inexperienced delegate sent to Berlin, became emblematic of the failure. He visited Theresienstadt Ghetto in 1944 and uncritically accepted Nazi propaganda, even stating wrongly that Jews were not deported from there. Claude Lanzmann later recorded Rossel's account in a 1979 documentary, A Visitor from the Living. Yet individual delegates acted with courage. Friedrich Born, the ICRC delegate in Budapest, saved the lives of about 11,000 to 15,000 Jewish people in Hungary, and Marcel Junod, a physician from Geneva, was among the first foreigners to reach Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. The ICRC received its second Nobel Peace Prize in 1944, and opened its World War II archives in 1996.

• 7. The Symbols On A White Field

  ›

  The Red Cross emblem was officially approved in Geneva in 1863. It is not the Saint George's Cross of the flags of England, Barcelona, or Georgia, where the red bars reach the edge; on the protected flag they stop short, which is why it is sometimes called the Greek Red Cross. In 1906, to answer the Ottoman argument that the design sprang from Christianity, officials promoted the idea that it was simply the flag of Switzerland with its colors reversed, honoring Swiss pioneers of protection for wounded combatants. No written evidence of that origin has ever been found.

  The Red Crescent first appeared on ICRC volunteers during the conflict of 1876 to 1878 between the Ottoman and Russian empires. The Turkish Red Crescent had been founded in 1868, partly in response to the Crimean War, when disease overshadowed battle as the chief cause of death among Turkish soldiers. The crescent was officially adopted in 1929, and 33 states in the Muslim world have recognized it. Other symbols followed as the movement reached beyond Christianity and Islam. In 1992, then-president Cornelio Sommaruga decided a more neutral emblem was needed for majority Hindu, Buddhist, or Shinto countries. On the 8th of December 2005, an amendment to the Geneva Conventions known as Protocol III adopted the Red Crystal, partly to accommodate Israel's Magen David Adom as a full member. Iran's Red Lion and Sun, admitted in 1923, was replaced by the Red Crescent in 1980 after the Islamic Republic was established, though the Conventions still recognize it as an official emblem.

• 8. When The Emblem Is Targeted

  ›

  On the 17th of December 1996, Nancy Malloy of Canada and five others were shot at point-blank range while sleeping in an ICRC field hospital in the Chechen city of Nowije Atagi near Grozny. Their murderers have never been caught. The 1990s saw more delegates die than at any point in the movement's history, often in local and internal conflicts that showed little respect for the Geneva Conventions or their protective symbols. Ricardo Munguia of El Salvador, a water engineer in Afghanistan, was shot by unknown armed men on the 27th of March 2003, a killing that prompted the ICRC to suspend operations across the country. Vatche Arslanian of Canada died in a Baghdad crossfire on the 8th of April 2003.

  The pattern continued into the Gaza war that began in October 2023, which the ICRC called abhorrent as it implored both sides to spare civilians. In January 2024, Israeli forces killed a Red Crescent crew sent to rescue the Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, who was also killed by Israeli gunfire along with her family, even though the rescue route had been coordinated in advance. In March 2025, eight Red Crescent workers and seven other medics were ambushed and killed by Israeli soldiers near Rafah, the deadliest attack on Red Crescent personnel since 2017. One worker who was later killed recorded the convoy of marked vehicles, lights flashing, approaching a distress call before the shooting began and ran for five minutes. The vehicles were crushed and buried by bulldozers, and the bodies were later found in a mass grave. These deaths sit against the movement's seven fundamental principles, proclaimed in Vienna in 1965, the first of which is Humanity: to prevent and alleviate human suffering wherever it may be found.