The ICRC learned with great sorrow of the death of Mr. Marc Blaser, a radio operator in Angola, on 16 December 1985.

Twenty-one years old and single, Marc Blaser went to Angola in October 1985 on his first mission for the ICRC. In the evening of 16 December, while in the neighbourhood of Lobito, he was killed in an armed attack. An inquiry is in progress to determine the exact circumstances of this tragic incident.

Although he had only recently joined the institution, Marc Blaser was highly thought of by all his colleagues for his good nature and his competence. The ICRC is grieved by the loss of this young delegate and has expressed to his parents and friends its profound sympathy.

The Malaysian Red Crescent Society (MRCS) has provided all facilities for the care and maintenance of Vietnamese Boat People (VBP) since the first landing on 4 May 1975 of 47 VBP, on a small island off the northeast coast of the Malay Peninsula. Since then, over a continuous period of 19 years more than 250,000 VBP have landed in Malaysia and all of them except about 6,500 have either been resettled in third countries or have been repatriated to Viet Nam. The remaining 6,500 are housed in two camps, located at Sungai Besi and Cheras, each a few kilometres outside the city of Kuala Lumpur.

Los cinco helicópteros rusos de transporte levantaban mucho polvo cuando, el 15 de junio de 1997, depositaban en Cartagena de Chairá su valiosa carga: 70 soldados de las fuerzas armadas gubernamentales, apresados por la guerrilla tras haber perdido un combate, nueve meses y medio antes. Con el espectacular aterrizaje en la selva comenzaba su libertad y finalizaba, asimismo, un trágico episodio de guerra, que había humillado a los altos mandos militares y había tenido a todo el país en ascuas. Tanto mayor fue la alegría cuando los 70 soldados, dados por desaparecidos, pudieron finalmente abrazar a la respectiva madre y toda Colombia pudo abrigar, durante algunos instantes, le dulce ilusión de una paz cercana. En presencia de observadores internacionales y de incontables periodistas, los jefes de la guerrilla concluyeron con un patético festejo la entrega de los soldados al CICR. Luego, éstos volvieron a subir a los helicópteros.

Following the events of 11 September 2001, measures aimed at countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) were intensified by States. Many countries around the world adopted strict anti-money laundering and CFT regulations for the transfer of funds globally. This process increased the costs of complying with regulatory requirements and imposed high penalties on banks for non-compliance. As a result, preventive measures – often known as “de-risking” – were taken up by banks, including terminating the accounts of clients perceived as “high-risk” for money laundering or terrorist financing, and delaying transfers. These measures, however, have had negative consequences, reducing financial access for local civil society organizations in conflict-affected contexts that are deemed high-risk for terrorist activities. Drawing on five years of research to understand the impact of de-risking on conflict-affected contexts from a local perspective, this paper reflects on the local political economy of CFT, with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa. It explores two key areas of inquiry. The first of these is the politics of interpretation – how counterterrorism as a discourse and a set of practices, of which CFT is one, gets interpreted by local authorities and banks, and subsequently gets reinterpreted to the population. This also has implications for which local actors are better positioned to access funds than others, and why. The second area of inquiry is the politics of vulnerability – how the local political economy impact of CFT can increase the social and economic vulnerabilities of some groups more than others. This paper demonstrates that under the guise of “counterterrorism”, local authorities in conflict-affected contexts have used CFT to restrict the non-profit and philanthropic space and are using banking regulations to shape that space in ways that are bound to have negative medium- and long-term implications for it.

As a social and political psychologist, I have been doing research on issues of collective behaviour and collective identities for over fifteen years. One of my three lines of research focuses on conflict at the intergroup level, and specifically on the factors that allow individuals to behave in a violent manner or in violation of certain norms, such as international humanitarian law (IHL). My work has to do, among other things, with strategies of “moral disengagement”; in other words, all the psychological justifications that we give ourselves for our behaviour, particularly when it comes to immoral, unlawful and violent behaviour.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Library was first created at the initiative of the ICRC's co-founder and president, Gustave Moynier. By the end of the nineteenth century, it had become a specialized documentation centre with comprehensive collections on the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, international humanitarian law (IHL) and relief to war victims, keeping track of the latest legal debates and technological innovations in the fields related to the ICRC's activities. The publications collected by the Library until the end of the First World War form a rich collection of almost 4,000 documents now known as the ancien fonds, the Library's Heritage Collection.

Direct witness to the birth of an international humanitarian movement and of IHL, the Heritage Collection contains the era's most important publications related to the development of humanitarian action for war victims, from the first edition of Henry Dunant's groundbreaking Un souvenir de Solférino to the first mission reports of ICRC delegates and the handwritten minutes of the Diplomatic Conference that led to the adoption of the 1864 Geneva Convention. This article looks at the way this unique collection of documents retraces the history of the ICRC during its first decades of existence and documents its original preoccupations and operations, highlighting the most noteworthy items of the Collection along the way.

The International Conference for the Protection of War Victims, held from 30 August to 1 September 1993 in Geneva, the “cradle” of humanitarian law, was an important event in international life. It gave an opportunity to diplomats of practically every nation not only to consider general issues of international humanitarian law, but also to discuss what to do in order to react adequately to the challenges of today, above all the escalation of armed conflicts and violations of international humanitarian law.

The first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded a century ago to Henry Dunant and Frédéric Passy, thus honouring two different aspects of the struggle against war: the endeavour to limit the suffering of war victims through humanitarian action, in particular the creation of the Red Cross; and the fight against war itself, or pacifism. The article traces the history of Dunant's candidacy and the uneasiness to which it gave rise in Geneva. Indeed, while recognizing the merits of Henry Dunant for promoting the idea of what subsequently became the Red Cross Movement, the ICRC with Gustave Moynier as its President considered that the International Committee itself should be a candidate for the Peace Prize. The attempt to put forward the institution (and not the person of Henry Dunant) failed, as did the candidacy of Moynier in the following year. The ICRC did, however, receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1911, 1944 and, together with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, in 1963 (the centenary of the Red Cross).

En 1919, Bela Kun, le révolutionnaire hongrois qui, pendant quelques mois, fut à la tête de la République soviétique de Hongrie, déclara au délégué du CICR qu'il comprenait pleinement la position et le rôle du Comité international. Cette association privée de citoyens suisses qui, indépendante de tout lien gouvernemental, apportait aide et réconfort aux victimes de la guerre, où qu'elles se trouvent et sans aucune distinction de nationalité, de confession ou d'idéologie, lui parut représenter véritablement le peuple suisse. Pour lui, le CICR, en raison même de son indépendance et parce qu'il s'adressait directement aux gouvernements en leur rappelant leurs obligations morales envers les prisonniers qu'ils détenaient et les soldats des forces adverses, appartenait au camp révolutionnaire.

Despite widespread State acceptance of the international law governing military use of force across the spectrum of operations, the humanitarian reality in today's armed conflicts and other situations of violence worldwide is troubling. The structure and incentives of armed forces dictate the need to more systematically integrate that law into operational practice. However, treaty and customary international law is not easily translated into coherent operational guidance and rules of engagement (RoE), a problem that is exacerbated by differences of language and perspective between the armed forces and neutral humanitarian actors with a stake in the law's implementation. The author examines the operative language of RoE with a view to facilitating the work of accurately integrating relevant law of armed conflict and human rights law norms. The analysis highlights three crucial debates surrounding the use of military force and their practical consequences for operations: the dividing line between the conduct of hostilities and law enforcement frameworks, the definition of membership in an organized armed group for the purpose of lethal targeting, and the debate surrounding civilian direct participation in hostilities and the consequent loss of protection against direct attack.

The International Committee felt much grief over the death in Auckland on July 10, 1964 of Mr. Léon Bossard, its delegate in New Zealand for a number of years.