Comité International de la Croix Rouge - Comments

-On a financial level, the ICRC is relatively transparent and can be credited for identifying “earmarked” funds in its budget: it was one of the few humanitarian organisations to do so in the 2000s. Like the American Red Cross since 1900, it began in 1948 to publish annual reports, first in French, then in English only from 1998 onwards . As the organisation has grown, so have its yearly reports, which adopted a lengthier format in 1975 and became increasingly voluminous with a n average of 101 pages in the 1950s, 95 in the 1960s, 116 in the 1970s, 138 in the 1980s, 308 in the 1990s and 395 in 2000-2005. However, there are inconsistencies. From one decade to the next, annual reports vary considerably in their presentation of the budget , the workforce or the frequency of visits to prisoners of war and prisoners of conscience . From 1990, for instance, the number of national societies recognised by the ICRC was no longer included, after the controversy surrounding membership requests by the Palestinian Red Crescent and the Israeli Society of the Red Shield of David (Maguen David Adom). Such gaps make direct comparisons difficult and entail certain adjustments to follow the organisation’s evolution and performance. According to Michèle Mercier, ICRC annual reports ended up gaining in length what they were losing in substance. Whilst the number of pages doubled between 1992 and 2002, there was a flourishing of statistical, logistical and operational details that masked the most important issues on violations of international humanitarian law. Unlike the IFRC, which has produced yearbooks on natural disasters since 1993, the ICRC never risked publishing political analyses. In this, it also differs from Amnesty International, which has provide d detailed, country-specific accounts of human rights violations since 1962. In short, the Committee gives little explanation for its choices and decisions. According to Robert Lloyd et al., it prefers to work behind closed doors because of its recruitment methods by co-optation. Of all the humanitarian organisations studied by Hetty Kovach, only the IFRC is truly accountable, operating under a democratic system that prevents minorities from seizing power and ensures a balanced geographical representation of the movement's different members.

-Generally speaking, the Committee's communication policy could be best described as “reserved” or even “silent” and “subject to self-censorship”. The institution prefers to avoid controversy by not reporting complaints by national societies concerning violations of the Geneva Conventions: a special dispensation which was approved at the twentieth International Red Cross Conference in Vienna in October 1965. For Jacques Freymond, the ICRC's obligation is to be firm and vocal when promoting humanitarian law within a multilateral framework but discreet and flexible when bilateral diplomacy is required to gain access to victims. To assist prisoners of war or civilian detainees, for instance, the institution makes confidentiality a priority and deals directly with the authorities involved. After editing in Geneva, its delegates’ reports are sent exclusively to the governments concerned. Only after the authorities quote the least compromising passages of a report does the ICRC consider publishing the whole document in order to counter political propaganda. In a press release dated 19 March 2008, for example, the institution denied the Sri Lankan Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ claims that the number of missing persons and extra-judicial executions had dropped in 2007 according to confidential reports by Geneva. Most of the time, the Committee does not need to publish the conclusions of its inspections , as the authorities in charge are careful not to release any information at all on the subject. The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland was among the few to unilaterally decide to publish in its entirety an ICRC’s report on a visit to Long Kesh internment camp on 31 August 1972.

-Communication between the Geneva Committee and the general public is just as economical. In the interests of impartiality, the organisation denounces warfare in general but does not condemn any war in particular. Nor is it opposed to the death penalty, unlike Amnesty International. This explains why the Geneva Conventions do not prohibit the execution of war criminals or rebellious prisoners of war. Consequently, the ICRC refused to comment on Saddam Hussein’s hanging in December 2006 (the late dictator had criticised the Committee because he had received only two letters from his family since his capture by American troops in Iraq in December 2003). In general, the institution avoids controversial subjects that are likely to have political implications. In this respect, the ICRC differs from the LRC and IFRC whose recommendations on public health also address social issues. In the early 1920s, for instance, the League of Red Cross encouraged a form of social justice and democracy by requesting governments to improve labour conditions and tackle unemployment in order to reduce the likelihood of accidents and illness. As for t he ICRC, it only became involved in structural and political issues at the end of the Cold War, when it attempted to play a role in conflict prevention.

-In the same vein, the Committee’s press releases are not really designed for the media and, consequently, have little press coverage. According to Claudio Caratsch, vice-president of the ICRC and a former Swiss ambassador, they are more commonly used for negotiation purposes. The aim of this humanitarian diplomacy is to encourage defecting governments to apply the Geneva Conventions. As a rule, the Committee is very discreet. It states what it does, not what it sees, and its declarations are coded. According to the Israeli historian Dominique-Debora Junod, “the ICRC members use neutral and impartial language. They do so by making clever turns of phrase with understatements, euphemisms, omissions, allusions, extrapolations and abstract ideas. Resulting language is very “waffly”, between neutrality and humanitarian ideals. Even after extensive examination, clear political intentions, emotions or personal feelings are few.” The ICRC “operates as a closed system”, explains Canadian expert Donald Tansley, who carried out an in-depth study of the movement. His report concluded that the Committee “is not open about what it is doing and why. It is not open to ideas and information from outside […] On the whole, the ICRC seems to have blurred the differences between the discretion which their work requires and an obsession with needless secrecy”.

-While Henry Dunant initially used the media to inform against the suffering of wounded soldiers at the Battle of Solferino, the organisation is nowadays completely committed to discretion and impartiality. As early as 1864 when it sent its first representative to the field, the Committee refused to take sides , assisted both parties to the conflict, made no comment as to the reasons behind the war and was eventually criticised by the press in Copenhagen because it failed to denounce Prussian attacks against two duchies coveted by the Danish crown, Schleswig and Holstein . The ICRC then continued to keep its communication policy under the strict control of its leader, Gustave Ador, who was, paradoxically, the owner of the Journal de Genève from 1871 to 1904. Until World War One, for example, non-members could not publish articles in the International Review of the Red Cross. In 1936 during the invasion of Ethiopia, the Committee even censored a report about fascist abuses as related by an envoy of the Save the Children Fund in Addis Ababa, Fritzi Small. Under pressure from the representative of the Italian Red Cross in Geneva, Guido Vinci Gigliucci, the article was removed from the International Review. The ICRC, explains Rainer Baudendistel, applied double standards in this regard, for both the Ethiopian and Italian Red Crosses denounced “barbaric” atrocities of the enemy, yet only the viewpoint of Roma was published in extenso. In the same vein, the Committee did not let researchers investigate its activities.  A rchives were classified and completely inaccessible to the general public , like those of Defence Ministries . Historians could consult a limited number of documents, but were not permitted to quote them, and had to agree in writing not to publish their work without the prior approval of the ICRC, which reserved the right to censorship. Only more than a century later, in January 1996, did the Committee decide, under pressure, to open its archives. Even now, a limitation period still applies, although the prescribed fifty years was reduced to forty in April 2004.

-The ICRC is also very strict on the obligation of discretion it requires of its delegates and collaborators.  Paul Des Gouttes, for instance, had to resign when several critical passages were deleted from the hagiography he wrote following the death of the Committee's president, Gustave Ador, in 1928. The ICRC even sued one of its delegates, Dres Balmer, who was posted to Zaire in 1979, Thailand in 1980 and El Salvador in 1981. His crime? He published a novel, Kupfer Stunde, where he described his prison visits and the suffering of the victims of the dictatorship in El Salvador. In late July 1982, Dres Balmer was summoned to Geneva and fired. Although the institution’s name was never mentioned, the ICRC argued that the book compromised its activities in Latin America , and obtained a Swiss court order to have it withdrawn. To avoid having the matter blown out of proportion or appearing to deny freedom of expression, the Committee eventually dropped the case in May 1984 when a French version of the book was published under the title L’heure de cuivre. Today, the ICRC remains vigilant, and keeps a close eye on the distribution of its internal newsletter, L’Avenue de la paix, where staff air their personal views.

-Consequently, the Committee rarely denounces the exactions witnessed by its collaborators. To avoid angering independence supporters who fought against the Dutch colonisers in Indonesia in July 1947, for instance, the ICRC reprimanded its representative at Batavia for launching a radio appeal to persuade the insurgents to stop violence against Chinese minorities. From experience, Geneva knew that leaks to the press could have negative effects for victims. The Swiss newspapers, for instance, had jeopardised negotiations with the Nazis when journalists claimed that French women held at Ravensbruck had given military information on Germany while being freed and evacuated to Switzerland in April 1945 . As a result, the ICRC only makes statements on serious, repeated violations that are corroborated by reliable sources, where diplomatic measures have not ended abuse and when a public accusation may help victims. This explains why the presence of delegates in the field is essential, especially when they are the only witnesses to exactions. Because it was not operational on site, for example, the ICRC refrained from denouncing the use of chemical weapons by Greek troops to smoke out the communists hiding out in the Peloponnese after the 1947 uprising. Likewise, it ignored reports by the press and freedom fighters that South African planes were spraying weed killer to destroy crops destined for the Frelimo (Frente de Libertação de Mozambique) in north Mozambique, according to an article from Le Monde dated 12 July 1972. It adopted a similar approach to the use of toxic gases by the Portuguese army against the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola), which denounced the problem in a statement on 10 July 1970. Nor is the presence of delegates sufficient to convince the ICRC to comment on violations of humanitarian law . The Committee publicly expressed its disapproval of the use of toxic gas in Yemen in 1967, but not in Ethiopia in 1936 or in Vietnam between 1961 and 1971, even though teams had been deployed in all of these countries. In Ethiopia and Vietnam, only one party to the conflict had an air force, so a denunciation would have clearly identified the culprit, unlike World War One, when both the Allies and Germany spread gases. Morocco, where the ICRC did not intervene during the Rif War, was an exception because of the pressure of public opinion and the approval of the government in Madrid, which authorized the Committee to publish its confidential correspondence over the use of mustard gas by Spanish colonial troops in a special issue of the International Review of the Red Cross in November 1925.

-Drafted in 1981 and amended in 2005, a document called “Doctrine 15” now sets out the various stages before the institution can denounce exactions and release confidential information . In the first stage, the plan i s to inform and discreetly involve third parties who might be able to convince defaulting nations to apply the Geneva Conventions. If unsuccessful, the Committee makes public statements on the lack of progress in negotiations. As a last resort, it can opt to denounce massive and repeated violations of human rights witnessed by its delegates in the field, as long as this is not prejudicial for victims. The threat of withdrawal can also be used to negotiate aid as it destroys the reputation of those responsible for atrocities. In press releases dated 21 March and 12 October 1973, for instance, the ICRC announced it was discontinuing visits to prisons in South Vietnam because its delegates were not allowed to be alone when interviewing political prisoners. However, the Committee has seldom used this strategy, unlike Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders).

-There are two conflicting views on this matter. The first, favoured by the ICRC, promotes confidentiality to avoid exposing victims and humanitarian workers to possible repercussions should they denounce abuses , even if their silence legitimises reprehensible practices . The second, favoured by Doctors Without Borders , informs against atrocities witnessed by the personnel posted on site, at the risk of being expelled and compromising aid operations . Both positions seem mutually exclusive. Thu s Bernard Kouchner had to leave the Red Cross and break his obligation of discretion to denounce the “genocide” committed by the Nigerian army during the Biafra War. Anne de Loisy also resigned to write a book about police violence towards detained asylum seekers in airports where she had acted as a mediator for the French Red Cross. Actually, the ICRC's discretion is not a requirement of international humanitarian law. In the field, other organisations are more vocal when dealing with prisoners of war, civilian detainees and displaced people. Even the UNHCR ( High Commission for Refugees), one of the United Nation’s least outspoken agencies, is less reserved than the ICRC when it comes to criticis ing the asylum policies of those countries it works in. The Geneva Committee is the product of a Swiss culture based on secrecy. According to Donald Tansley, the organisation often decides to keep silent because it is easier, not because it is necessary .

-The Committee’s refusal to publicly denounce violations is therefore motivated by the desire to keep communications channels open with the perpetrators of crimes against humanity. According to Daniel Muñoz-Rojas and Jean-Jacques Frésard, the promotion of humanitarian law is more effective than calls for compassion or moral judgements to improve victims’ situations. In the words of François Bugnion, “the ICRC has realised that a confidential approach is infinitely more likely to result in the desired outcome — putting a stop to violations — than a publicly aired intervention. I n most cases, governments that have been criticised are less willing to remedy the contravention they have been accused of because it could be seen as an act of admission. They would rather justify their posi tion , and diplomats are never short of arguments in this regard. How many times have we seen public demonstrations that have been counter-productive? The country in the firing line hardens its position […] to prove it has done nothing wrong. Inevitably, it is the victims that pay the price.” François Bugnion goes on to explain the three main objections to informing against abuses. Firstly, “certain violations become stigmatised, almost arbitrarily, […] while others, of equal or greater importance are not denounced.” Secondly, “legal formalism focuses on violations that have been clearly identified , but pays less attention to their seriousness or the suffering they cause.” Thirdly, “more and more appeals can bring less responses”, as human tragedies become increasingly commonplace.

-Being discrete does have the advantage of helping the institution to remain impartial. In fact, neutrality is not always compatible with informing against abuse. This is why the Geneva Committee tries to avoid being used by warring parties in propaganda politics. For example, it rarely follows up on demands by opposition parties in exile to inspect the prisons of a dictatorship. Between 1958 and 1970, it only acted on roughly 25% of such requests, according a study by Jacques Moreillon. In this respect, it pays not to scrutinise too closely the annual ICRC reports . If we are to believe David Forsythe’s article in the Human Rights Quarterly, increased prison visits would indicate the existence of a problem, whilst a decrease would signal the situation’s return to normality. But actually , ICRC activities behind closed doors are determined by accessibility and do not necessarily reflect the intensity of repression. Basically, the number of prisons inspections depends on how frequently the institution has been authorised to enter detention centres. A lack of visits does not always mean that prisoners’ rights have been respected. Consequently, s ince 1987, the ICRC has specified in the introduction to its annual reports in French that “the length of text dealing with a country or a given situation is not necessarily in proportion to the seriousness of the problems brought to light and dealt with by the institution. There are situations, of great importance on a humanitarian level, that are not mentioned here simply because the ICRC was refused permission to act. On the other hand, the description of situations where the ICRC was given permission to run a wide variety of activities requires a lot of space, and the length of the text has no relation to the seriousness of the humanitarian problems encountered”.

-At the end of the day, Geneva’s statements and operations depend on accessibility and not the intensity of crises despite the wish to remain impartial at all times. According to Donald Tansley, for instance, the ICRC favoured Cyprus over Cambodia in 1974, and American prisoners of war in Vietnam over victims of the Burundi pogroms in 1972. The bias was most certainly caused by geographical proximity, mandate reasons or cultural affinities, and not simply funding or logistics. Catherine Rey-Schyrr, one of the movement’s official historians, admitted that after 1945, the ICRC went a little too far in its efforts for German prisoners of war: it even offered legal assistance to those being accused of crimes against humanity. Lacking financial and legal means, it was less involved in helping other equally needy populations in Europe, not to mention the Jewish victims of the holocaust. The Cold War years were a key example of this. On the one hand, the ICRC had almost no access to communist countries and therefore had little to say about the gulag. On the other hand, it was involved with communist prisoners in Greece in the 1960s and Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, and its annual reports were used by leftists to denounce right-wing dictatorships.

-In spite or because of restrictions in the field, the same ICRC humanitarian action could inspire different interpretations. Geneva's comments on the United States and Israel are revealing. After the war against terror was launched by Washington in 2001, asserts David Forsythe, the organisation took two years to comment on violations of international humanitarian law at Guantanamo for fear of antagonising its most important funder. Lee Casey and David Rivkin, on the other hand, considered that the Committee overstepped its mandate and failed in its duty of discretion by openly criticising George Bush’s policy in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay from 2003 onwards. They stressed that the ICRC asked the White House to apply rules the American government had not even adopted, namely the additional protocols of 1977. It seemed like an easy way out: attacking a democracy rather than one of the many dictatorships whose human rights violations could have been denounced. By doing so, the ICRC appl ied a double standard, as it was not as virulent against others that had refused to give “prisoner of war” status to captured American soldiers in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and, more recently, Afghanistan. This view was shared by the Republican senator Daniel Fata, a head of national security studies. In his opinion, the ICRC’s campaign against violations of international humanitarian law by the United States after 2001 was of unprecedented scale, and tantamount to Amnesty International’s lobbying. As a result, Daniel Fata encouraged the White House to reconsider its relationship with the Geneva Committee, especially as Washington was the institution’s biggest funder.

-Israel and the occupied territories also presented numerous challenges for objective communication after the Six Day war in June 1967. On one side, Amnesty International accused the ICRC of relaying the Jewish propaganda because it was officially satisfied with detention conditions. Actually, reports the Sunday Times of 19 June 1977, the institution was not immediately informed of new arrests, it could not conduct surprise visits, it was not allowed to interview prisoners during interrogation, and it had no access to special cells, police posts and military barracks where, precisely, there was a strong risk of torture. The government and its army, Tsahal, refused to apply the Geneva Conventions de jure, arguing the conflict was “internal” . The ICRC was only able to intervene with a full mandate to assist 20,000 Syrian inhabitants of the Golan Heights, for whom family reunification procedures were arranged and visits organised across the border. But in the Palestinian territories, the Committee had to rely on a de facto permission. So it was more vulnerable to government pressure, especially when some of its confidential reports were leaked in the United Nations and used by Arab countries to denounce Israel. As a result, the ICRC had to stop to mention the names of the victims of torture and, to check their allegations, it was compelled to confront Palestinian prisoners with those they accused of wrongdoing. In a press communiqué dated 12 January 1976, the Committee eventually admitted that all detention problems had not been solved. The communication battle was definitely not over. On 18 September 1977, the Sunday Times revealed that the ICRC had submitted more than 200 complaints about ill-treatment, yet the Israeli ministry of Justice pretended that Geneva’s confidential reports were positive… and refused to publish them. The scandal led the Committee to fire its general delegate in Israel, André Tschiffeli, who had given an interview to the Jerusalem Post of 5 August 1977 to deny the accusations of the Sunday Times about the systematic use of torture on Palestinian prisoners.

-On the other side, the ICRC faced considerable wariness from the Jewish authorities. It was already suspected of being anti-Semitic because of its doubtful role during World War Two and its failure to recognise the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross, the MDA (Maguen David Adom). Officially the ICRC could not accredit the MDA because of its logo, but unofficially it hoped that this position would encourage Arab states to ratify the Geneva Conventions. During the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, the institution appealed to all parties in the conflict to spare civilians, and publicly criticised Israel's non-committal approach to the issue. At the same time, it failed to comment on similar lapses by other belligerents like Egypt, which had recognised the ICRC’s appeal on condition of reciprocity, thus contravening the Geneva Conventions. Again, in December 1973, the Geneva Committee provoked strong reactions when it supported the creation of an international panel to investigate violations of international humanitarian law in the region. Even if it was not directly involved in the project, the institution took the liberty to openly denounce abuses, in particular those committed by Tsahal soldiers. The head of its delegation in Tel Aviv, René Kosirnik, further angered the authorities when he described Jewish settlements in occupied territories as a war crime and let his interview be published in the International Herald Tribune on 18 May 2001. In the same vein, Cornelio Sommaruga, president of the Committee, compromised its neutrality when he announced he would take part in a United Nations Commission to investigate the massacre of Palestinian refugees at Jenin in April 2002: the project met with strong opposition from Tsahal and was never actually set up. In sum, the ICRC has been accused of exaggerating problems and extensively criticising the Israelis despite its silence on the holocaust during World War Two. Admittedly, the organisation did call on Palestinian terrorists to stop targeting civilians and publicly condemned their violations of the Geneva Conventions. However, it mainly focused on the behaviour of Israel by denouncing its destruction of homes, forced evacuations, expropriations and transfers of Arab populations . Its protestations even increased over time. After several “off the record” warnings , the Committee denounced the use of torture in a press release dated 21 May 1992. Later on, it declared the Jewish settlements to be incompatible with articles 27 and 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. In a press release dated 5 December 2001, it extended its criticisms to occupations of land, in addition to army check-points and the deliberate hampering of humanitarian aid activities. In another communiqué on 18 February 2004, it eventually took a public stand against Israel’s construction of a barrier along the edge of the occupied territories. Built for safety purposes, the wall actually facilitated seizures of Palestinian property and was the subject of a United Nations complaint at the International Court of Justice.

-Nevertheless, the Committee is usually considered by funders and observers as one of the most impartial humanitarian organisations on earth. According to a survey that was carried out at Geneva’s request and whose methodology was not made public, for instance, respectively 100%, 94% and 90% of 1,200 Lebanese people interviewed after the Israeli attack of 2006 thought that the ICRC was trustworthy, independent and neutral. Only 8% felt that the Committee recruited its employees because of their Christian faith rather than their professional skills. Donald Tansley's 1975 report had already confirmed this state of affairs: “For individuals caught up in international and non-international armed conflicts, political prisoners, victims of hostage-taking and kidnappings, refugees and other victims in distress, no ICRC activities are incomplete, ineffective or ill-considered.” While political errors have been made, reiterates David Forsythe, the Committee has never deliberately covered up non-humanitarian activities. Its directors have always tried to provide aid in an impartial and neutral manner. In fact, the ICRC is more independent of the Swiss government than most national societies. It is therefore in a better position to provide aid impartially compared to local Red Crosses . Of course some national societies do attempt to remain neutral . Thus the Australian Red Cross withdrew from   the Australian Council for Overseas Aid (ACFOA) in 1978 after this NGO lobby became increasingly political in its comments on American military operations in Vietnam in 1973 or Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975. In the same vein, explains Tanja Schümer , the BRCS (British Red Cross Society) withdrew from a forum that criticised London's aid policies in Sierra Leone in 1998. To remain impartial in North Caucasus in the early 2000s, add Abby Stoddard et al., the organisation then indiscriminately distributed aid instead of targeting the neediest villages and appearing to give preferential treatment to some clans to the detriment of others. T he League of Red Cross Societies was as careful during the Vietnam War. According to Daphne Reid and Patrick Gilbo, its official publications tried to give the impression that activities focused equally on the communist North and nationalist South despite the involvement of the American Red Cross on the side of Saigon. But g enerally speaking, national societies are far from neutral. When their country is at war , they often adopt excessively patriotic tones . Nor do they remain unaffected by conflicts taking place in foreign lands. Succumbing to pressure from President Franklin Roosevelt, who wanted to send humanitarian aid to Madrid to compensate for its arms embargo, the American Red Cross took sides with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War . According to Charles Hurd, it was only in February 1939, at the end of the conflict, that it started to supply the Nationalists of General Francisco Franco . The Russian Red Cross did not perform better and paid journalists to produce smug reports on socialism’s progress in the Soviet Union, as explained by Sam Russell, who was interviewed in Le Monde on 25 March 2006 and who had been the Moscow correspondent for the British Communist party mouthpiece, The Daily Worker,in the 1950s . Nor did the IFRC escape Cold War tensions. On the one hand, it acted as a platform for Red Cross organisations denouncing imperialism. On the other, it consolidated the position of the United States' allies by refusing to exclude from its ranks Latin American dictatorships or the South African apartheid regime . Just a fter he took the reins of the IFRC in 1987, Mario Enrique Villarroel Lander publicly declared his support for El Salvador’s head of state, regardless of the ICRC’s attempts to remain impartial.

-Regarding communication, it remains to be seen whether the Committee's policy of confidentiality actually helps victims. In his autobiography, for instance, Carl-Jacob Burckhardt claimed to have obtained the transfer of the brutal commandant of the Esterwegen concentration camp by discreetly informing the authorities in 1936. However, he failed to mention that the said commandant went on to become the head of the Dachau complex, one of the largest Jewish extermination centres in World War Two! According to the Swiss historian Paul Stauffer, this omission was part of a plan to make the ICRC look good in the face of accusations of anti-Semitism after 1945. In any case, it did not prove the efficien cy of confidentiality to discourage abuses. In fact, the ICRC's policy of silence is based on a misunderstanding of the benefits of denunciation. Delegates’ testimonies did not always have negative impacts for victims. During World War One, the Committee published and sold its reports on visits to prisoners of war without compromising their well-being. Such transparency was instrumental in bringing cycles of retaliation to an end, as it reassured governments and public opinion in warring countries. Later on, when the ICRC began to assist political prisoners, the advantages of eyewitness accounts were also obvious . In the aftermath of the Greek civil war, for example, the organisation got the consent of Athens to publish extracts of prison inspections in the International Review of the Red Cross of February 1949, and this initiative created support for civilian detainees. In January 1960, again, the French press leaked a Committee report on prisoners in Algeria that was instrumental in the army’s decision to give up torture. In the same vein , Geneva’s criticisms of chemical weapons caused Egypt to stop using toxic gases during the civil war in North Yemen in 1967. Exposure of human rights violations has not jeopardised ICRC activities. In 1977, after it publicly objected to restrictions imposed on visits to communist prisoners in Indonesia, the Committee was given permission to return the following year to inspect detention camps. During the Iran–Iraq war in the 1980s, ICRC activities were suspended on numerous occasions but for reasons completely unrelated to the institution's accusations: indeed, operations were jeopardized by the warring parties even before the Committee publicly spoke up about their violations of the Geneva Conventions. Likewise, i n May 2004, leaks of ICRC confidential reports to the American and British press did not prevent the organisation from continuing to visit prisoners held by the Allies in Iraq. On the contrary, photos of torture in the Abu Ghraib prison led the occupying troops to react and carry out investigations. Meanwhile, ICRC confidential visits had not seemed to improve detention conditions. Worse still, they caused the authorities to move prisoners away, to avoid facing criticism. According to the New York Times on 18 June 2004, the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Head of the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), George Tenet, had order ed in October 2003 to hold an alleged terrorist in secret so that he could not be assisted or identified by the Committee.

-At the end of the day, the ICRC's discretion can be counter-productive . As the Canadian expert Donald Tansley explains in his 1975 report: “Secrecy on some matters is harmful to protection and assistance efforts. If others do not know what you are doing, they cannot possibly support you, and they may distrust you as well”. Indeed, the ICRC has occasionally been suspected of spying. For example, in Algeria during World War Two, one of its associates, Georges Graz, was accused of intelligence because he was in touch with a German agent and produced a lengthy report on the political situation in North Africa. In October 1943, he was briefly taken into custody, but released after four days thanks to the intervention of the Swiss Consul in Algiers. The incident showed how the Allied intelligence services were suspiciou s of the Geneva Committee’s supposed “neutrality”. Opened in 1996, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) archives in Washington revealed that a total of 21 ICRC delegates were suspected of spying for the Germans and accepting money stolen from the Jews by the Nazis! The United States knew what they were talking about. During the Korean War in 1950, the American Army taught its soldiers to pass encrypted messages in the mail carried by the ICRC, in case they were taken prisoner. Germans and Austrians also had previous experience, as seen in the case of Countess Nora Kinsky. Originally from Bohemia, she was suspected by Moscow of spying under cover of the German Red Cross and its assistance programme for soldiers captured in Russia during World War One. According to Monica Czemin's documentary movie aired on the Franco-German television channel Arte on 21 November 2007, she allegedly handed over information to Vienna on prisoners of war who supported the independence of Slavic countries and established a Czech legion that fought the Austro-Hungarian Empire alongside the Russians in 1916. Likewise, adds Rainer Baudendistel, a nurse of the Egyptian “Red Cross” helped the fascists in Somalia to localise and bomb a Turkish General under the orders of the Negus at Bulale during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1936.

-In addition to these problems, the ICRC's policy of confidentiality has three other disadvantages. Firstly, it prevents the aggressors from being held accountable, to the point that the Committee appears complicit. Secondly, it masks evidence that could be used to condemn war criminals being tried in international or local tribunals. Thirdly, it is incoherent, because the task of exposing abuses is passed on to other organisations and the Committee cannot control “leaks” of its confidential reports. As the defender of the Geneva Conventions , the institution too often plays a purely administrative role, just noting down the various violations of the international humanitarian law. Regarding the Hungarian Jews during World War Two, for instance, Arieh Ben-Tov criticises the organisation’s “legal narrow-mindedness” and “excessive prudence”, hidden behind the official position to respect national sovereignty. This restraint is also visible in its assistance to prisoners of conscience. Between 1958 and 1970, the ICRC was informed of 71 countries where political detainees were mistreated. However, it only attempted to inspect 46 of them , of which 12 rejected its requests. According to Jacques Moreillon, the institution did not even try to visit the other 25 countries, as it expected a categorical refusal which might jeopardize relations should intervention in a major humanitarian crisis be needed. As a result, the ICRC chose to put off immediate action in favour of future opportunities.

-For Michael Ignatieff, the ICRC’s confidentiality is dangerous as it could be seen as tacit approval of human rights abuses and even genocides. In theory, condemnation by the Committee should lead to a response from the international community that would help bring an end to massacres . But remaining neutral means that the aggressors, torturers and war criminals end up shirking their responsibilities. By refusing to denounce Serbian crimes in Bosnia, claims for instance Gregory Kent, the ICRC contributed in blocking the possibilities of political and military intervention in the crisis. During a ministerial conference in Geneva on 29 July 1992, the organisation’s president chose to expose the ethnic cleansing operations without naming those responsible. In a speech delivered on 10 August 1992, Simone Veil, the leader of the liberal group in the European Parliament, criticised him severely for this, reminding him of the institution's guilty silences on the Jewish Holocaust during World War Two. Admittedly, the ICRC did speak out publicly against Serbian violations of the Geneva Conventions on 31 March 1993, including their commandeering of seventeen prisoners in Batkovic who were sent to dig trenches on the front line. But meanwhile, the institution tried to present a balanced vision of the situation and its appeal of 13 August 1992 claimed wrongs were committed by both sides. In the end, writes Gregory Kent, it exaggerated the slightest fault committed by Muslim forces and even went so far as to criticise them for mistreating prisoners at Celebici camp, which was in fact under Croatian control. The ICRC also failed to take into account the fact that the Bosnian enclave was probably unable to guarantee suitable detention conditions because its people were surrounded and already finding it extremely difficult to obtain supplies for themselves. By focusing on the treatment of prisoners, concludes Gregory Kent, the Committee covered up the genocidal nature of the war waged by the Serbs.

-A second problem, linked to the first, is that the ICRC's policy of confidentiality often jeopardises judicial attempts to condemn war criminals. The first president of the Committee , Gustave Moynier, who had envisaged an International Criminal Court in 1872, had no idea that the institution would later on hinder the investigators from gathering evidence. Historically, the ICRC wa s rarely approached in such matters. After World War One, the Allies did not want to destabilise the Weimar Republic and therefore left it up to the Germans to set up a Tribunal in Leipzig to judge citizens accused of war crimes. Of 896 suspects, only 12 were actually brought to justice and the majority was acquitted , including a Captain, Karl Neumann, who had violated the Red Cross emblem and torpedoed a British hospital ship, the Dover Castle, whilst it was transporting troops. In the end, only two officers were expelled from the army, and they did not even serve their four-year sentences despite their machine-gunning of the survivors fleeing the Llandovery Castle, a hospital ship that had been sunk by the German navy. The Allies, with the exception of the British and Americans, condemned this travesty of justice and took matters into their own hands. More than 1,200 trials were conducted in France and around 80 in Belgium.  But at no point did the authorities call on the ICRC to testify against the perpetrators of war crimes. Nor did the Committee play a part in the Istanbul trials conducted by the Turkish against their own military: a tougher exercise, as shown by the sheer number of cases and convictions being handed down with death penalties . Unlike the Germans, who were primarily concerned with preventing the establishment of an I nternational Court of Justice, the Ottoman Empire actually sought to impress the Allies, in the hope of limiting the reparations payable under a peace treaty . It also took advantage of the situation to indict opponents from the Ittihad party and make them responsible for the Armenian genocide. As a result, there was no need for Geneva to supply additional evidence. Later on, Max Huber, ICRC president from 1928 to 1945, was content to let things lie in this area, despite being a member of the International Court of Justice in The Hague from 1922 to 1930. In 1936, he even refused to give to the League of Nations evidence on abuses committed by the Italians in Ethiopia. And in 1943, again, he abstained from responding to a Nazi to investigate on the Katyn massacre.

-It is mainly after the Second World War that t he Committee began systematically refusing to participate in enquiries into violations of international humanitarian law . During the negotiations for the adoption of t he Geneva Conventions in 1949, it ensured that soldiers accused of crimes against humanity would continue to hold the status of prisoners of war until found guilty. According to t he ICRC, the Allies were bound by their conventional obligations and could not unilaterally modify the reasons for the detention of a soldier until he or she was repatriated and definitively liberated. The Committee had strong reservations about the artificial “transformation” of prisoners of war who, once freed, were almost immediately rearrested as civilians based on, for instance, their connections with the national-socialist party in Germany or imperialist circles in Japan. The ICRC anticipated problems when the United States and the Soviet Union refused to grant access to the soldiers they had captured. Moscow wanted war criminals to be considered outside of the Geneva Conventions and subject to Russian common law. Washington, on the other hand, had passed anti-Nazi regulations that were effective retroactively and went against the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Afterwards, the cold war confirmed that enquiries into violations of international humanitarian law could be very compromising for a neutral institution, especially when the Geneva Committee made the mistake to accept a request by the Western members of the United Nations Security Council to investigate the use of chemical weapons by the United States during the Korean War. After this controversy, the ICRC refused to follow up requests by the Tunisian government or by the French Army to investigate, respectively, French abuses in Bizerte in July 1961 or a massacre by Algerian freedom fighters in Melouza in June 1957. Each time, the Geneva Committee argued that its delegates did not witness the problems and that its role was only to relay complaints against violations of international humanitarian law according to a memorandum signed on 12 September 1939 and confirmed on 23 November 1951. In Congo after January 1961, for instance, it refused to participate to an investigation on the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and to provide to the United Nations the reports of its delegates, who were the last to interview the victim before he disappeared. Likewise, it refused in January 1968 to communicate information on abuses committed by the military dictatorship in Greece . W hen Turkish troops invaded Northern Cyprus in April 1974, notes Theodor Meron, the ICRC even unwittingly deterred the European Court of Human Rights from enquiring into the treatment of prisoners of war at the hands of Ankara, as they were already being assisted by Geneva. Finally, when the International Criminal Court was set up in 1998, the Committee was formally dispensed from testifying before judges who were investigating crimes against humanity. It argued that, otherwise, those responsible for the atrocities would be tempted to systematically expel humanitarian organisations on the battlefields. Thus in 1999, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) refused to hear a former translator of the ICRC who wanted to testify against Milan and Blagoje Simic. The procurator argued in vain that the Committee was restricting individual freedom, and Geneva replied that confidentiality was mentioned in the contract of its employee and was still valid thereafter. The Tribunal also reminded the various positions of the ICRC, who sometimes denounced human rights violations and allowed three delegates to write an answer to questions raised by defenders during the Nuremberg trials in 1946. The Committee replied that at the time, these testimonies did not contain any specific information on the accused. Moreover, it was the institution which ultimately decided to let its staff testify. The ICTY could compel states to disclose secret information, as it did with Croatia in 1997. But in the present case, the Committee had the same objectives as the Tribunal. An international institution, the ICRC claimed to be on par with the ICTY. It was not a state, neither than an intergovernmental organisation or a member of the United Nations. So it couldn’t be under a tribunal that was set up by a resolution of the UN. In 2000, however, it couldn’t prevent the ICTY from using without its consent ICRC reports that were given to the Court in 1999 and transferred to the lawyers of Stevan Todorovic, the Serbian police chief in Bosnia en 1994. In 2004, again, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (UNICTR) did not extend the institution’s exemption to Red Cross societies, and did call volunteers who were not directly employed by the Geneva Committee during the genocide in 1994.

-A third problem is the inconsistencies in the ICRC's policy of confidentiality. T he Committee cannot prevent others from denouncing violations of international humanitarian law . As a result, the organisation can always be called to account by the media for “knowing but doing nothing.” The stubborn silence of the institution has sometimes been so embarrassing that authors like Keith Suter have recommended that the IFRC take care of relief operations so that the ICRC can monitor and expose violations of the Geneva Conventions without compromising assistance to victims.

-Two questions must be asked at this point: what are the outsiders’ initiatives, and is the Committee’s communication policy coherent? With regard to the first question, the ICRC cannot really control the publication of its reports of prison visits. It can only stop communicating them to the detaining authorities. During the Korean War, for instance, it wanted to appear willing to intervene in the North as well as the South, and took great pains to publish the unanswered letters it had sent to the Pyongyang regime from September 1950 onwards, in order to prove that it was the communists who refused its assistance in their zone. However, the Committee had to change tactics when the American army suspended its right of access to Koje-do Island, where some prisoners of war rebelled and were killed in February 1952. Fearing political propaganda, Geneva decided to stop sending reports of its visits to the warring parties. Its embargo was not only directed against North Korea for declining the ICRC’s offers of help. It also targeted the United States, as they had prevented the transmission to the enemy of a Committee’s report on the rebellion at Koje-do. To avoid being accused of taking sides, Geneva exceptionally chose to publish parts of this report in the International Review of the Red Cross in April 1952.

-Usually, it is governments that decide on whether to release or not confidential Committee documents . Sometimes justice demands publication, for instance at the end of the Vietnam War, when the American authorities were compelled to hand over the ICRC's reports from Saigon after extracts were featured in the Washington Post of 22- 23 June, and 23 July 1975. Political propaganda also plays a role . In 1969, for instance, the Greek military junta cited the most positive aspects of the Committee's prison inspections and thus forced the institution to publish the full document. This was to counter criticism by the opposition for painting the detention conditions in too favourable a light. In 1949 during the civil war , communist insurgents had already slammed Geneva for publishing extracts of its visit reports with the consent of the authorities to reassure the international community. But the ICRC has also been criticised in the opposite case: w hen governments refuse to release its confidential reports. In the United States in 2003, for example, President George Bush Junior decided not to publish positive ICRC reports on the improvement of detention conditions in Iraq because that would have forced him to give information on how prisoners were treated by the American Army in Afghanistan or Guantanamo. As a result, the Committee was unable to present evidence challenging the conservatives who accused the organisation of unduly criticising Washington or, on the other hand, the liberals who reproached it for being too lenient on its biggest funder.

-In an interview with Le Monde newspaper on 29 June 2006, the head of the ICRC, Jakob Kellenberger, admitted that the communication policy of the institution could sometimes appear incoherent. For example, the Committee denounced secret detentions by American security services in Iraq in 2004, but not by the Russians in the Caucasus in 2006 because it had been expelled from the region and had no witnesses on the ground. The ICRC’s communications always depended on access to victims. As a result, the organisation kept quiet about communist gulags, for it was not allowed to assist their prisoners. Meanwhile, it was able to send delegates to conservative countries, and therefore spoke out against authoritarian regimes allied to the United States during the Cold War. In a single territory, the Committee also gave the impression of implementing a double standard according to the legal categorisation of victims. During World War Two, i t protected the military held by the Germans but remained completely silent on the Jews at the hands of the Nazis. Likewise, it denounced violations of the Geneva Conventions during the Iran-Iraq War, especially when Saddam Hussein's troops reso rted to chemical weapons from November 1983 onwards. In a press release dated 23 March 1988, for instance, the Committee condemned the use of gas in the city of Halabja in the Kurdish province of Suleimaniyeh. But it restricted its communication to the military alone. It waited until the defeat of Saddam Hussein's regime in January 1991 before speaking out about the massacre of civilians in Halabja.

-In the same vein, the ICRC has not always been coherent in imposing a duty of confidentiality on its delegates. On the one hand, as we have seen, it censored Paul Des Gouttes and brought legal proceedings against Dres Balmer. On the other hand, it did not reprimand some delegates who spoke out on their own. In 1939, its former representative in Addis-Ababa, Sydney Brown, was one of the firsts to publish ICRC confidential reports in order to denounce the Italian abuses and the compromises of the institution with Roma during the invasion of Ethiopia in 1936. Geneva did not react, as it had already fired him after receiving dubious information from the fascist secret services and a private detective hired by the Italian Red Cross to blackmail and buy Sydney Brown’s silence by proving his alleged homosexuality. Marcel Junod then published his memoirs on the Spanish Civil war without being criticised by the Committee. An officer in the French Army and an ICRC delegate from 1936 to 1947, Raymond Courvoisier also escaped the wrath of Geneva when he explained in his biography how the Republican prisoners of war were exploited by the Nationalists in iron ore mines . As for Jacques de Reynier’s testimony on the massacre of Deir Yassine by the Israeli A rmy on 10 April 1948, it was widely used by the Arab League and the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organisation) for political propaganda. The ICRC was similarly silent in 1996, when Laurent Marti, the founder of the Red Cross and Red Crescent museum, dredged up some bitter souvenirs.  The sociologist Carlos Bauverd was also free to express his political opinions as long as he said nothing about his work at the Committee. Even René Kosirnik, the head of the ICRC delegation at Tel-Aviv, kept his position despite his declarations in the International Herald Tribune in 2001.

-Undeniably, Geneva's communication policy has changed over time. Keith Suter quotes Melchoir Borsinger, the ICRC General Delegate for Europe in 1974, who explained that initially, the Committee had little to lose, and could therefore talk freely . As the guardian of the Geneva Conventions, however, it became more institutionalised and concerned with its international reputation. After its silence during World War Two, the ICRC initially attempted to reply to accusations of being biased in favour of Germany in 1939-1945 or South Korea in 1950, for example in its annual report from 1952. But the taste for secrecy soon took over, as noted by historian Caroline Moorehead. Over the next three decades, the ICRC spoke out on average once a year. It was only when human rights organisations began asserting themselves that the Committee's attitude changed. After denouncing the use of toxic gases in Yemen in 1967, the ICRC alerted the international community of violations of the Gene va Conventions during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Protests multiplied in the 1980s. For instance, Geneva made statements on the impossibility of accomplishing its mission in Afghanistan after the Red Army’s invasion in 1979. In 1984, again, it publicly criticised the Islamic Republic of Iran for indoctrinating its prisoners of war to turn them against Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq. According to an article published in The Economist on 21 May 1988, the ICRC’s statements on violations of international humanitarian law were more frequent between 1980 and 1987 than between 1945 and 1980: 37 compared to 35. The end of the Cold War, explains Nicholas Berry, eventually allowed the institution to shake off its reserve and demand a stricter application of the Geneva Conventions without being unfairly accused of serving Western interests. The development of humanitarian interventions meant the ICRC launched 104 appeals to the international community between 1989 and 1996, compared to 74 between 1946 and 1987. A focus on the Balkan conflicts in Europe contributed to this evolution: in 1991 and 1992, notes Michèle Mercier, Yugoslavia was the subject of 40% of the Committee's press releases, to the detriment of other major crises in Liberia, Sudan and Afghanistan. Changes in fundraising policy – with a renewed focus on private sources – also led the ICRC to modernise its marketing strategies and advocacy policies. Merging two pre-existing entities, a dedicated department, COMREX, was set up in June 1992 for communication and external resources . Since then, the institution has continued to open up by launching a website in 1995 and establishing a media relations office in London in 2004. In 2007, for instance, the ICRC published eye-witness accounts of the war victims in Iraq, under the title Blessures dans le palmier dattier (“Injuries in the date palm”).