International Committee of the Red Cross

The International Committee of the Red Cross grew out of a Permanent International Committee that five Swiss men, including Henry Dunant, formally constituted at a meeting in Geneva on 17 February 1863, following Dunant's own eyewitness account of the suffering of wounded soldiers at the Battle of Solferino in 1859. It was established to provide humanitarian relief to those wounded in armed conflict regardless of nationality, and its work led directly to the first Geneva Convention of 1864, the treaty framework that still governs the humanitarian laws of war today.