One Swiss businessman's battlefield visit grew into the most ratified rules of war
After the Battle of Solferino in 1859, Geneva businessman Henry Dunant found some 40,000 wounded soldiers left on the field with no medics, supplies or truce to reach them. His 1862 book, A Memory of Solferino, called for a neutral relief agency and a treaty to protect it. Both arrived within two years.
In 1863 he and the Swiss lawyer Gustave Moynier set up what became the International Committee of the Red Cross. The next year the Swiss government invited European states plus the United States, Brazil and Mexico to a diplomatic conference, and 26 delegates from 16 countries met in the Alabama room of Geneva's city hall under General Guillaume Henri Dufour. On 22 August 1864 they adopted the first codified international treaty covering sick and wounded soldiers, signed that day by 12 states. Britain joined in 1865 and the United States in 1882. The original sits in the Swiss Federal Archives in Bern, and Dunant shared the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901.
Expansion came in fits. Additional articles in 1868 tried to extend protection to war at sea, but only the Netherlands and the United States ratified them, and the Dutch later withdrew. A 1906 conference of thirty-five states produced an improved convention, drawing on lessons from the Russo-Japanese War and clarifying the rights of medical staff; it technically survived until Costa Rica signed up to the newer treaties in 1970. In 1929 two conventions followed, one covering prisoners of war after the First World War exposed gaps in the Hague rules. Delegates debated banning aerial bombing and starvation but could not agree.
In 1949, spurred by the war crimes revealed at Nuremberg and Tokyo, conferences produced four treaties. The first updated protection for wounded soldiers on land, the second extended it to the wounded, sick and shipwrecked at sea, the third covered prisoners of war, and the fourth, the first ever not about combatants, protected civilians.
Ratified in whole or with reservations by 196 countries, the conventions rank beside the UN Charter as some of the most widely accepted agreements anywhere. Much of their content now counts as customary international law, binding even states and armed groups that never signed.
Source: Geneva Conventions
