The Need to Reconsider the Mission of the International Committee of Red Cross: From Reducing Human Suffering to Preventing Armed Violence

The ICRC is the most prominent international humanitarian rights actor in charge of the protection of human beings in armed violence, but the organization's performance is flawed for three reasons: Deviate human rights from duty descriptions, focus on the classic concept of war, and rely on the principle of confidentiality of information to ensure presence in critical areas; Such an approach is useless in preventing international crimes and ineffective in restoring the situation of victims and establishing transitional justice. ICRC is very cautious in achieving its goals and sometimes does not expose violations of the rule to international public opinion, although it tries hard to resolve the issue in the field, but the main question is whether it will be possible to fix the shortcomings without modifying the organizational instructions? This article is based on practical and library research methods, criticizing the performance of the organization with regard to the spirit of international human, humanitarian and criminal law documents to show the shortcomings and the need to change the attitude and performance of the organization towards evolving tools and goals of contemporary armed violence.