Category:Red Cross

The Red Cross owes its formal beginnings to the experience and vision and of a young Swiss, Jean Henri Dunant, who instituted an international movement resulting in the first Geneva Convention, of 1864.

The simple short-limbed red cross on a white background (an inversion of the Swiss flag) now serves as a symbol of relief and care in Western Europe and the Americas for victims of both war and peacetime disasters. After World War Two, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) found itself increasingly operating in other countries where the symbol's implicit reference to the Swiss flag and neutrality was less well understood, and where a red cross against white had unfortunate historical associations (with invading Crusaders), so in these countries, the ICRC operates as the Red Crescent.

Since 2005, the ICRC has also sometimes used a third symbol, the diamond shaped Red Crystal, in situations where both of the more usual symbols are considered problematic. While the last two letters of "ICRC" can now be understood as standing for either "Red Cross" or "Red Crescent", in the interests of neutrality the central organisation's four-character name is no longer officially an abbreviation of anything, and is simply "ICRC".