We have very little means of assuring safety and security for our staff other than our strict 160-year-old neutrality and impartiality.” She has 1,000 staff in Ukraine, and recently said: “The closer you come to the front line, the more people know how important neutrality is because it protects you. Accumulated trust, neutrality and confidentiality are critical components of success for the ICRC, she believes. Faced by a world in which the post-1945 respect for an agreed rules-based order has eroded, she cannot unilaterally enter prison camps or order cooperation from the countries with which she has to deal. She says the mandate of the ICRC means that it is not an advocacy group or a body capable of mounting inquiries. The natural style of the relatively new head of the ICRC, a former Swiss diplomat, Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, is one of discretion. Zelenskiy questioned whether the ICRC could any longer claim the legal and moral right to be the upholders of international humanitarian law: “And such self-elimination is the self-destruction of the Red Cross as an organisation that was once respected.”īy contrast, Zelenskiy has expressed admiration for the more pugnacious style of Rafael Grossi, the director of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, which has visited both Russia and Ukraine to uphold safety at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station. We do not see that they are fully fighting for access to the camps where Ukrainian prisoners and political prisoners are held, or that they are helping to find deported Ukrainians.” In his address later that month to the G20 in Bali, Zelenskiy let rip again, saying: “11,000 children, hundreds of thousands of deported adults, and … we have not found support in the International Committee of the Red Cross. The following month, apparently fed up with the perceived inaction, the president’s office announced the creation of a human rights information staff, saying the ICRC seemed incapable of calling out, or investigating, Russian human rights abuses. The mandate of the Red Cross must be fulfilled.” The Red Cross has obligations, primarily of a moral nature. In his nightly address on 13 October, Zelenskiy said: “I believe the International Committee of the Red Cross is not a club with privileges where one receives a salary and enjoys life. Ukraine’s anger was sparked by the ICRC’s inability to access Olenivka, a notorious camp in eastern Ukraine where dozens of Ukrainian PoWs died in an explosion and fire in July. One bone of contention has been the ICRC’s approach to combatants. Lubinets added Ukraine wanted a second organisation to be established with co-responsibility for accessing political prisoners, arguing that competition might spur the ICRC to be more proactive. He said: “One organisation uses its history its name to get in the way of doing something impactful.”
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