The Diplomatic Conference on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts opened in Geneva on 20 February 1974. This Conference was convened by the Swiss Government and is being attended by plenipotentiary representatives of 118 States Parties to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 and Members of the United Nations, as well as by many observers for intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations. The Conference will sit until 29 March to deal with two additional draft protocols to the Geneva Conventions, which the International Committee of the Red Cross has drawn up with a view to supplementing existing international humanitarian law in the light of recent developments in matters of war.

In 1970, the ICRC opened two regional delegations in Africa, one at Yaoundé (Cameroon) for West and Central Africa, and the other at Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) for East Africa. In both countries, the ICRC permanent delegates enjoyed throughout their mission the full support of the authorities and the co-operation of their National Red Cross Societies.

On the occasion of his visit to Switzerland, H.E. Mr. Moktar Ould Daddah, President of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, called at the headquarters of the ICRC on 19 February 1974.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has been informed by the Federal Political Department, Berne, that the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam, in a letter dated 31 October 1973 and received on 3 December, notified the Swiss Government of its accession to the four Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, to which it made some reservations.

On 19 February 1974, at a ceremony that took place at the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Dr. Eric Martin, President of the ICRC, presented the ICRC silver medal to Mr. Leo Biaggi de Blasys, ICRC delegate in North Italy for the past thirty years.

The International Review has several times in the past published information about the operation sponsored by the Red Cross on behalf of the Indian population of the Amazon region. It will be recalled that, under an agreement with the Brazilian Ministry of the Interior and in close co-operation with the League of Red Cross Societies and the Brazilian Red Cross, the International Committee sent a team to Brazil early in May 1970, to make a survey of the health situation and the needs of the population.

The International Committee is publishing a report on the proceedings of the XXIInd International Conference of the Red Cross in the course of its consideration of the draft Protocols to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949. We quote below the introduction to that report. The three conference resolutions to which it refers were published in the January 1974 issue of International Review.

Concomitantly with its large-scale operations in 1973, the International Committee of the Red Cross continued its less extensive actions in Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The few figures below give a glimpse of the tasks performed in the traditional ICRC functions of visiting places of detention, distributing relief supplies, and seeking the missing and reuniting dispersed families through its Central Tracing Agency.