IRRC No. 258
The Protocols additional to the Geneva Conventions
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The world now has a population of 5 billion, as against 1 billion in 1863 when the Red Cross was founded and the codification of the law of armed conflicts was initiated. For almost a century, the Red Cross concerned itself successively with soldiers wounded in action, victims of naval warfare, prisoners of war and civilians abandoned in wartime to the arbitrariness of foreign rule.