International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement
The organized International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is a humanitarian movement with approximately 16 million volunteers, members, and staff worldwide. It was founded to protect human life and health, to ensure respect for all human beings, and to prevent and alleviate human suffering. Within it there are three distinct organisations that are legally independent from each other, but are united within the movement through common basic principles, objectives, symbols, statutes, and governing organisations.
The Red Cross and Red Crescent emblems, the symbols from which the movement derives its name, Geneva, 2005
The Red Cross, after the Battle of Gravelotte in 1870
Henry Dunant, author of A Memory of Solferino
Original document of the First Geneva Convention, 1864
Humanitarianism is an ideology centered on the value of human life, whereby humans practice benevolent treatment and provide assistance to other humans to reduce suffering and improve the conditions of humanity for moral, altruistic, and emotional reasons.
Volunteers from AmeriCorps in Louisiana
Any insult or oppression of a man because he belongs to another race, another language or another social class than me, I regard as barbaric. L. L. Zamenhof on Homaranismo.
