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.

International humanitarian law is the branch of customary and treaty-based international positive law whose purposes are to limit the methods and means of warfare and to protect the victims of armed conflicts. Grave breaches of its rules constitute war crimes for which individuals may be held directly accountable and which it is up to sovereign states to prosecute. However, should a state not wish to, or not be in a position to, prosecute, the crimes can be tried by international criminal tribunals instituted by treaty or by binding decision of the United Nations Security Council. This brief description of the current legal and political situation reflects the state of the law at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It does not, however, describe the work of a single day or the fruit of a single endeavour. Quite the contrary, it is the outcome of the international community's growing awareness, in the face of the horrors of war and the indescribable suffering inflicted on humanity throughout the ages, that there must be limits to violence and that those limits must be established by the law and those responsible punished so as to discourage future perpetrators from exceeding them.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) first called for the abolishment of nuclear weapons in September 1945.1 The call came in the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, where ICRC delegates had witnessed the catastrophic effects of nuclear weapons while working alongside the Japanese Red Cross to care for tens of thousands of wounded and dying civilians. The experience had a profound impact on the ICRC and on the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement (the Movement) as a whole. During the following decades, the Movement continued to regularly call for the “absolute prohibition” of nuclear weapons2 – one of the most abhorrent and inhumane types of weapon ever created. To date, the ICRC and the National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies have made a significant contribution towards nuclear disarmament by influencing debates, state policy and practice, and international law on nuclear weapons.

The idea that Rio de Janeiro has been plunged into an actual “war” against organized crime is widely discussed and is supported by an ever-increasing number of people in Brazil. Not surprisingly, such discourse has led to less protection for the civilian population, particularly in the so-called favelas, while allowing security forces to carry out operations with even greater relative impunity. This article argues that although urban violence in Rio de Janeiro is indeed a serious problem, it does not reach the threshold required to be considered a non-international armed conflict.

This article examines how women and girls with disabilities who are survivors of sexual and gender-based violence crimes have a right to access justice under Article 13 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). It explains how the right to access justice requires States to actively address gender and disability stigmas and discriminations that create barriers within justice systems, and how the failure to do so violates the CRPD. Further, the author argues that when a State fails to eliminate such barriers post-armed conflict, the International Criminal Court may then exercise jurisdiction over these crimes in order to raise awareness of crimes against women and girls with disabilities, strengthen domestic justice systems by pressuring States to investigate and prosecute these crimes, and act as a court of last resort for crimes against women and girls with disabilities.

The growth of access to the internet, wide availability of smart phones and increased public access to remote sensing data from hundreds of satellite systems have spurred a revolution in tracking the linkages between armed conflict and environmental damage. Over the last decade, a growing community of open-source investigative experts, environmentalists, academics and civil society groups have applied these methods to document war crimes, human rights violations and environmental degradation. These developments have created new opportunities for building accountability and transparency. The wealth of data on conflict-linked environmental damage has already been successfully leveraged to address acute and long-term environmental health risks and inform humanitarian response and post-conflict environmental assessments in Iraq, Syria and Ukraine. There are, however, larger questions on how to best make use of these data streams and information layers, and how to navigate the opportunities and limitations of these developments. This article will outline the new developments in this field and provide recommendations to ensure that data is used responsibly and effectively to strengthen accountability for environmental damages as a result of armed conflict.

Analyses of the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence often focus on the principles’ meanings and/or the challenges of applying them in practice. This article, by contrast, steps back to address foundational but somewhat neglected questions about whether these principles can accurately be designated “the” humanitarian principles; about how they came to govern the whole humanitarian sector; about their legal character and normative content; and, more fundamentally, about whether the principles can even have objective character and content. It begins by defining “humanitarian principles” and determining whether and on what basis certain principles constitute “the” humanitarian principles. The article then traces the history of how the principles came to govern the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and diffused from there to non-governmental organizations and the United Nations system. It then analyzes the principles’ legal character and normative content for each of the above-mentioned categories of actor plus States, demonstrating that the principles do not – and, legally, cannot – have fixed legal character and normative content. While humanitarian actors share common understandings of the principles, legally the character and content of each principle flows from its source for the actor in question.

Persons with disabilities are at higher risk of injury or death during an armed conflict, either as specific targets or through inability to protect themselves. Humanitarian responses concentrate on meeting the immediate basic needs of an average population. Yet historically, the situation of persons with disabilities during armed conflict, as well as peacebuilding processes, has been largely absent in the discussion at the Security Council. On 20 June 2019, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 2475. This groundbreaking text marks the first time the Council has dedicated an entire resolution to the situation of persons with disabilities in situations of armed conflict. The resolution has significantly raised the attention and understanding of the situation of persons with disabilities in the context of the armed conflict in the Security Council and beyond. This article details the process that led to Resolution 2475, as well as what has happened since.

In this issue, the Review has chosen to give a voice to former child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Children recruited by armed groups experience separation from their families, physical and psychological violence, sometimes including sexual exploitation, as well as interruption of their education. Whether they joined an armed group forcibly or by choice, as a fighter or carrying out a different function – every story is unique, reflecting numerous challenges faced by children in these circumstances. The testimonies below reflect children's experiences, the difficulties they have faced and their hopes for a new life. In order to protect them and their relatives, their testimonies have been anonymized.

Since its launch in 2021, the Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Organizations (the Charter) has been signed by hundreds of humanitarian actors across the world, including local and national organizations, United Nations agencies, National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and large international NGOs. The Charter's development grew out of a sector-wide recognition that humanitarians have a role to play in addressing the crises of climate change and environmental degradation, and that fulfilling this role would entail changing how they work. Two years into its existence, the Charter has helped build momentum towards this change and has provided a useful measurement tool for how much remains to be done.

This paper traces the origins, inspiration and process of the Charter from the perspective of the present authors, who co-led the Charter's development. The article highlights some of the challenges that we faced and how these were addressed. In taking stock of progress towards the Charter's goals, the article flags areas where further effort is needed to adequately strengthen the humanitarian response to the climate and environmental crises.

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has brought about a major shift in our understanding of and approach to disability, not least in terms of its implications for other frameworks of international law. Yet, considerations with regard to disability in the context of international humanitarian law (IHL) remain the exception, meaning that persons with disabilities in practice often do not benefit from the same degree of protection as others who find themselves in situations of armed conflict. These shortcomings can be further exacerbated by an interplay between impairment and other individual characteristics such as gender and age, resulting in at times exceptional disadvantages faced by women and girls with disabilities. The present article therefore aims to propose ways in which our modern-day understanding of disability may inform the interpretation and application of IHL, as well as to showcase how the interaction between disability and other characteristics such as gender and age will shape said interpretation and application.

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.

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.