The International Red Cross is an organization of three constituents. The oldest is the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), founded in 1863 by five Geneva citizens following the publication of Henri Dunant's A Souvenir of Solferino. The second is made up of the National Societies of the Red Cross, of the Red Crescent—in the moslem countries—and of the Red Lion and Sun in Iran. There are 114 such societies. There may be only one in each country. (In Israel there is a society similar to a Red Cross Society but it has not yet been admitted into the International Red Cross because its emblem—the Jewish Star—has not been accepted by the International Conferences.) The third constituent is the League of Red Cross Societies which was founded in 1919 and which is the federation of the National Societies. It too has its headquarters in Geneva. Its mission differs from that of the ICRC but the two institutions are linked by an agreement and they co-operate closely in certain cases. The ICRC also co-operates frequently with the National Societies which maintain direct connexion with it.

The Henry Dunant Institute is inaugurating its collection of scientific works with an important book by F. Kalshoven which is reviewed in this issue. We are pleased to publish below a paper which this writer delivered at the International Congress on Humanitarian Law in San Remo last September. (Ed.)

Since some years, concern has been expressed on the part of various press associations on the dangers attending reporters who, in order to collect news material in the exercice of their profession, move into territories where hostilities are in progress.

In our December 1969 issue we called attention to the first volume of the “Henry Dunant Institute Collection” containing “Un Souvenir de Solférino” and some of Dunant's unpublished writings under the general title “L'Avenir sanglant”. The collection has now been enriched with a new volume entitled “Mémoires” which the Henry Dunant Institute is editing in French, jointly with the Éditions de l'Age d'homme, Lausanne. The book was compiled and presented by Professor Bernard Gagnebin, Dean of the Geneva University Faculty of Arts. He undertook the selection of the manuscripts—102 exercise books—found in three boxes deposited with the Geneva University Public Library. This was a difficult and delicate task, as Professor Gagnebin himself admits in a lengthy introduction: “the Mémoires were not in the form of a continuous text but of an unfinished work. We reconstituted them from more than thirty exercise books and we divided them into thirty-four chapters”.

The word “relationship” has for some time now become, in the nursing profession at least, one of those terms which, due to its indiscriminate use, has lost any specific meaning and has come to be just another colourless expression endowed with whatever meaning the user may choose to give it. It may be bandied about as a weapon or as a form of justification, and the emotional content with which it is loaded simply helps to aggravate mutual misunderstanding and to stress ideological differences.

If the subject covered by medical law must be stated, it is easy to say that it is the practice of medicine. This, the work of the doctor, should be defined by the jurist. The doctor in the first place is he who cures. It is an axiom that the purpose of medicine is to protect and preserve human life as far as possible. Confronted daily by the suffering and death of his neighbours, the doctor, nolens volens, finds himself as a privileged technician at the centre of a problem which it would be illusory to ignore.

The European Economic Community, in its desire to participate in international efforts to bring aid to Pakistan refugees in India, last summer donated, through the ICRC, 43,000 tons of rice and 7000 tons of other cereals, to the value of 48 million Swiss francs.

In our previous issue, we reported on the opening meeting on 24 May 1971 of the Conference of Government Experts, convened in Geneva by the ICRC, and at the same time we gave the texts of the opening speeches which revealed how important the meeting was. The Conference finished on 11 June and we now quote below the message of the President of the ICRC at the closing session, as well as three papers delivered outlining the work of the Conference.

It will be recalled that, with the agreement of the Brazilian Ministry of the Interior and in close collaboration with the League of Red Cross Societies and the Brazilian Red Cross, the ICRC sent a team to Brazil in May 1970 to study the situation and needs of the Amazonian Indians. The team was led by Mr. S. Nessi, ICRC Delegate-General for Latin America, and comprised three doctors, B. Aakerren, S. Bakker and R. Habersang (who were loaned to the International Red Cross by the West German, Dutch and Swedish Red Cross Societies, which agreed also to meet the cost of the expedition) and a Swiss ethnologist, Mr. R. Fürst. They were joined in Rio de Janeiro by Dr. A. Borges dos Santos, a Brazilian Red Cross doctor. As they penetrated deep into the country, we published information on their journey, on the aid that they gave and on the medical centres that they set up.

Torture is so odious a form of outrage in relation to the individual as to be inconceivable except in connection with (alleged) claims of the community, e.g. in the case of judicial torture, to which resort is had in order to prove or to prevent crime. Judicial torture is a form of penal proceedings. It is open to question both on ethical grounds and in regard to its efficacity.

Notwithstanding the volume reached by the Geneva Conventions in 1949, they do not cover the whole field of human misfortunes. It is now more than twenty years since they were drafted. Moreover, although Geneva Law was developed in detail in 1949, The Hague Law, on the contrary, which deals more with the regulation of hostilities and of the utilization of weapons, goes back to 1907, when bomber aircraft had not yet come into existence.

On 25 May 1971, the International Committee launched the following appeal to National Red Cross Societies:

During the past few years, several appeals have been made for assistance to the various countries affected by the war in South-East Asia: Laos—January 1968; Vietnam—February 1968; Laos—April 1970; Cambodia—June 1970. In view of the permanent state of war which exists throughout Indochina, and in view of the infinite suffering resulting therefrom, the International Committee of the Red Cross is today making a general appeal to the generosity of National Societies, calling on them to come to the aid of all the victims of the conflict, regardless of political or ideological affinities.

In its issue of April 1971, International Review printed an account of the Conference of Red Cross experts convened by the ICRC that had taken place at The Hague, in co-operation with the Netherlands Red Cross, from 1 to 6 March 1971. A report on its work was submitted to the Conference of Government Experts on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law, it, too, convened by the ICRC, which opened in Geneva on 24 May 1971.

In its Circular No. 479 of August 23, 1970, the International Committee of the Red Cross had the honour to invite the Central Committees of National Societies to send in the names of nurses and voluntary aids whom they judged qualified to receive the Florence Nightingale Medal. This invitation, which quoted Article 1 of the Regulations, was accompanied by questionnaires bearing various headings for the candidatures.

The second phase of the operation for the repatriation of Koreans from Japan, begun on 11 May 1971, under the auspices of the Red Cross Societies of Japan and of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is going ahead. As already announced in our last issue, the first ship taking repatriates left Niigata on 14 May with 204 persons on board. A second ship sailed on 18 June taking 58 families, a total of 169 persons.

From 17 July to 8 August 1971, Mr. Marcel A. Naville, President of the ICRC, accompanied by Mr. Georg Hoffmann, ICRC Delegate-General for Africa, went to Ethiopia, Kenya, Senegal and Cameroon. The purpose of the trip was, on the one hand, to contact government authorities and Red Cross leaders in each country and, on the other, to visit the two ICRC regional delegations set up a year ago in Yaoundé and Addis Ababa.

ICRC delegates carried out visits to places of detention in three countries. During each visit, the delegates talked in private with the detainees of their own choice. Reports on these visits are sent to the authorities concerned.

From 27 November to 3 December 1970, the President of the ICRC, Mr. Marcel A. Naville, accompanied by Mr. Pierre Basset, Assistant Director, and Mr. Serge Nessi, Delegate-General for Latin America, was in Nicaragua for the Ninth Inter-American Red Cross Conference, the report on which is given below. On route to Managua, Mr. Naville stopped in Venezuela and Panama.