Good evening, Mr. Chair and committee members.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak with you.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, or ICRC, highly values its relationship with the Government of Canada. This relationship encourages us to carry out our mandate without fear or hesitation, while mindful of the support provided, not only for our work, but also for the protection of international humanitarian law. Unfortunately, this protection is becoming increasingly significant every day.
I just referred to international humanitarian law.
That's international humanitarian law, also known as IHL or the laws of war, which brings me to my organization.
The ICRC was born on the battlefields of Europe based on two ideas, the first being that there should be a set of minimum humanitarian standards and protections during warfare. This was the origin of the Geneva Conventions and wider humanitarian frameworks that we all know today. This body of law is distinct from the human rights law that many of our colleagues have spoken about and underpins some of the specific concerns they raised.
Humanitarian law is universal and is non-derogable. What I mean by that is it cannot be waived under a state of emergency, so this law, this international humanitarian law, applies fully today in Ukraine as it does in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen or elsewhere.
When we speak of IHL, we speak of protection that should be afforded to those people affected by conflict. We also speak about the obligations on those people who are conducting conflict and the obligations on those seeking to offer humanitarian services during conflict. It defines explicitly the responsibilities that the ICRC and other humanitarian organizations may exercise in today's battlefields.
ICRC's mandate is to protect and assist victims of war and is therefore somewhat different from that of human rights organizations. We work differently. We put a premium on neutrality and discretion to assure our access and proximity to those in need. We exercise that dialogue bilaterally and in confidence to achieve the best possible outcomes on the ground and in policy influence. In that sense, we are complementary to the important work of the human rights activists you've heard so far tonight, but we're a slightly different beast.
The other idea defining the Red Cross movement was that there should be national societies, national relief organizations such as the Canadian Red Cross, that can work as independent auxiliaries of the humanitarian services of their governments.
The ICRC remains the specialist conflict-focused arm of this wider Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement and the task today is ever more complicated. I would share with you just a few trends and a few asks, a few reminders or suggestions.
Today, as we operate in over 100 countries, employing 22,000 staff members and spending over $3 billion Canadian a year, we are concerned that the conflicts we are facing are multiplying. They are increasing both in duration and in number, and we're facing an international order today that is increasingly struggling to bring any form of negotiation that can impose peace on these contexts.
As great powers shift in their focus from counterterrorism and long-term insurgencies towards global strategic competition, we see more and more assertive regional actors, as well as increased coups as states see opportunities for new alliances. We see a multiplication of non-state armed groups; we count 612 currently in the contexts where we are working directly. We see increased conflict in urban areas. We see both increased suffering due to that but also longer-term infrastructural damage caused by that urban conflict. We see the focus shifting rapidly to all the new crises—Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine—while nothing is yet solved in Syria, Yemen, Libya, the Sahel, Congo, South Sudan, Myanmar or elsewhere.
We see both COVID and climate change impacting conflict, highlighting the inequalities, the corruption and the frustrations, rendering populations ever more vulnerable, most obviously in the Sahel but also in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
We see new domains where force is projected, where crime and risk is increased, notably in the cyber domain and around the protection of the data of the people we're trying to assist.
Finally, we see ever-increasing challenges and expectations on humanitarian organizations in ever-decreasing space with which to operate safely. What I mean by that is national governments, non-state armed groups, but also the desire to see solutions not coming from former colonial powers, as well as the continued use of sanctions and other restrictive measures by bigger powers and by the United Nations all impacting on the space in which humanitarian organizations can respond.
That leads me to five or four quick messages. The first—