Peter Maurer

Ensuring the respect of international humanitarian law and principles is one of the key areas necessary to establish accountability chains. ”

The young, the old, women, the disabled, the sick and the wounded are entitled to protection under international law. Too often, the ICRC's calls for those laws to be respected are ignored. ”

We believe that settlement expansion policies pursued in recent decades by successive Israeli governments have facilitated the process of de-facto annexation. It has complicated the dialogue between the different communities. ”

The creative capacity of the private sector should be harnessed to develop new and more effective ways to deliver humanitarian solutions. ”

Very often, development agencies or even some of the humanitarian actors choose the... more comfortable type of work, where it is safe, while the more important work has to be done where it is profoundly unsafe. ”

The whole essence of humanitarian work and the Geneva Convention is that neutral, impartial organisations can operate during war. ”

We need to continue to modernise current humanitarian work while at the same time drive a more systemic shift in how we envision the operation and financing of humanitarian solutions. ”

The relatively unpredictable flow of funds to humanitarian organizations, and the bureaucratic strings often attached to them, can have a highly negative impact on an organization's ability to plan and execute programmes effectively. We need to be able to rely on predictable income flows to plan sustainable programmes. ”

Each day that passes without kids being able to go to school is an enormous burden on the future. ”

We see a transformation of warfare from the big armies and battlefields in open spaces to a fragmentation of armed groups and smaller armies, which move into city centres, which increasingly become the theatre of warfare. ”