ABSTRACT
This essay uses the history of the Red Cross/Crescent movement to analyze the connection between human rights and international humanitarian law from 1863 to 1949. It argues that until 1921, both the Red Cross/Crescent movement and state signatories to the Geneva and Hague Conventions considered the rights of war victims to be limited to international conflicts between “civilized” states and contingent on the reciprocal behavior of the enemy. Only in 1921, in reaction to a series of crucial developments during World War I, did the international movement become committed to universal rights for war victims. It declared that combatant and noncombatant war victims possessed equal rights; that these applied universally to both international and civil wars; and that these rights were inalienably guaranteed by a moral code that transcended agreements between sovereign states. From 1921 to 1939 many of the efforts to secure these rights failed, due to opposition by established governments and to the non-cooperation of national Red Cross/Crescent societies. In 1949, however, four greatly expanded Geneva Conventions began to incorporate the movement’s 1921 declarations, providing for the first time a legal basis for the rights of both civilians and victims of non-international armed conflicts.
