05-18-2004, 11:31 AM
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#5 (permalink)
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Junkie
Location: Sydney, Australia
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They are probably one of the most significant non-state international authorities in this matter due to the fact that the International Red Cross basically INVENTED the Geneva Convention.
From an article I read just yesterday:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/conten...talk_hertzberg
Quote:
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The codification of rules of warfare into laws of war—that is, into formal, written, supposedly binding international agreements—was a product of the nineteenth century. It arose from the same can-do spirit of the age as did the invention of mechanized wars fought by huge conscript armies. The visionary behind that humanitarian effort—its Napoleon—was a young Swiss businessman named Henri Dunant, who, in 1859, witnessed the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino, fought in northern Italy between the French and the Austrians. So horrified was Dunant by the sufferings of the wounded, thousands of whom died of injuries that could have been treated if there had been anyone to treat them, that, in short order, he founded what would become the International Committee of the Red Cross and convened an international conference to draft a new kind of universal treaty. The result, in 1864, was the Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field—the first Geneva Convention. By 1867, it had been ratified by all the great powers of Europe. The United States did not ratify it until 1882, but in 1863 President Lincoln’s War Department had drawn up its own set of rules, which anticipated many of the provisions not only of Dunant’s Convention but also of the revised and extended versions of 1906 and 1929. The four Geneva Conventions that are in effect today—covering the treatment of the wounded on land and at sea, prisoners of war, and civilians in time of war—were drafted in 1949, in the aftermath of the Second World War. Some two hundred countries have ratified them, including all the members of the United Nations.
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