Medical assistance to wounded and sick in time of war has become inconceivable without the protection of humanitarian law.

It is to the great credit of the Red Cross founders and the members of the 1864 Diplomatic Conference that they immediately recognised the need not only to ensure care for the wounded but also to protect them by humanitarian law. This was codified in the Geneva Convention of August 22nd, 1864, for the amelioration of the condition of the wounded in the armed forces in the field.

The Joint Commission entrusted with the distribution of the income of the Empress Sh6ken Fund met in Geneva on March 18, 1965. The Japanese Red Cross was represented by the Ambassador, His Excellency Mr. Morio Aoki.

One of the ICRC nurses spent several months last year in the field hospital at Uqhd in the Yemen. Her personal notes during the period in which she carried out her humanitarian task are well worth reproduction here, for like the many articles and photographs which we have already published on the ICRC's action in the Yemen, they describe the difficulties of work in the desert but they also show how useful is this task, especially in respect of training nursing personnel

The general delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross for Asia, Mr. André Durand, arrived in Saigon on February 13, 1965.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has received from the Federal Political Department at Berne a communication informing it that the Government of Jamaica gave notification on July 17,1964, to the Swiss Federal Council of that State's accession to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, accession which took effect on August 6,1962, the date on which that country became independent.

From March 22 to April 2, the International Committee of the Red Cross organized its first training course for certain of its staff and a limited number of Swiss students prepared to make themselves available for service to the ICRC, in particular for missions abroad.

During 1964, the Visitors' Service of the ICRC received some 2,500 persons.

Many of these were members of National Societies of the Red Cross, Red Crescent and the Red Lion and Sun, representing more than 50 different nations: Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, China, Congo, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Guatemala, Hungary, India, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Rumania, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Spain, Sudan, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States, Upper Volta, Uruguay, the USSR and Yugoslavia.

The Central Tracing Agency in Geneva, received a request from a person living in Paris, who had been without news of his family since 1918. He had left his parents, four brothers and two sisters in Russia.

The ICRC has drawn up a very brief summary of these Conventions, in addition to its various publications to promote their dissemination and which have been mentioned in earlier issues of the International Review. This summary is proposed as a basic minimum of instruction to the armed forces and is applicable in certain circumstances. The authorities concerned, none the less, have still a duty, in general, to give more detailed and complete instruction, in order to spread as widely as possible the knowledge of these humanitarian statutes to which 104 States are now signatory.