Top 44 Peter Maurer Quotes

Humanitarian assistance, once conceived as a short-term relief effort, is increasingly the only substitute for long-term development work in protracted armed conflicts.

The issue of corruption in the humanitarian system is not an issue which is fundamentally different from dangers of corruption in other areas. One of the best ways to strengthen accountability is to engage in principled and law-based humanitarian action.

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.

The sad fact is that horrendous human conflict is nothing new.

Every year, we ask our donors to dig deeper. And every year, they gladly, generously comply. It is now up to us to find ways and means to forestall the day when they cannot – or will not. Or the consequences for people in war zones could be disastrous.

We must understand the factors that cause fragility, violence, and conflict in order to develop solutions that will meaningfully reduce instability at its roots rather than merely addressing the symptoms.

As responsible politicians, you have to manage migration.

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.

While the nature of warfare is changing and wars are moving into cities, they are also becoming longer and their consequences more impactful.

The ICRC did not see Nazi Germany for what it was. Instead, the organization maintained the illusion that the Third Reich was a ‘regular partner,’ a state that occasionally violates laws, not unlike any army during World War II, occasionally using illegal means and methods of warfare.

There is a clear business case for building the resilience and capacity of local communities, businesses, and institutions because a peaceful, educated, and productive population will stimulate economic growth in the long term.

Not enough countries, not enough armies, not enough armed groups are abiding by the fundamental human values enshrined in the Geneva Conventions.

Trust into leadership evaporates with communities when they see that their problems are not adequately addressed, neither at the national level nor at the international arena.

Torture can destroy the social fabric of communities, degrade a society’s institutions, and undermine the integrity of its political systems.

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.

It has always been clear that any use of nuclear weapons would have catastrophic humanitarian consequences.

They say that truth is the first casualty of war. But there is another casualty as well: trust. As conflict escalates, trust between people and political leaders crumbles away as surely as night follows day.

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.

We need to understand that the Geneva Conventions are not just some historical documents born of another time, created for another purpose.

People living through armed conflicts need infrastructure and services which will last, and the last thing on their mind is which budget line applies.

Businesses operating in fragile or conflict-affected environments bear a responsibility to, at the very minimum, do no harm and avoid fuelling conflict or reinforcing fragility.

Every day, we hear of civilians being killed and wounded in violation of the basic rules of international humanitarian law and with total impunity. Instability is spreading. Suffering is growing. No country can remain untouched.

You treat detainees humanely because you know the other side will also treat detainees humanely.

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

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.

The fragility created by protracted conflicts, resulting in destroyed cities and dramatically insufficient services, is not something that humanitarian organizations can address comprehensively. Only political solutions can end armed conflicts.

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.

As conflicts last longer, as the scale of needs increase, we are having to adapt. There is an increasing blurring between immediate humanitarian assistance and long-term development needs.

Local businesses and communities must be included from the very start in developing solutions to fragility, violence, and conflict.

Concrete steps are needed to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in military plans, doctrines, and policies.

We cannot guarantee that a humanitarian catastrophe of the extent of the Holocaust will not happen again. On the contrary, we witness a catalogue of atrocities every day in wars across the globe.

If you back out of a convention… you can’t dodge your obligation. Torture is still not acceptable.

New technologies are rapidly giving rise to unprecedented methods of warfare. Innovations that yesterday were science fiction could cause catastrophe tomorrow, including nanotechnologies, combat robots, and laser weapons.

Cities tend to be representations of societies: diversity and inequality find their extremes in urban settings. Yet, when war is added onto pre-existing inequalities, high levels of poverty, or even disaster, urban fragility increases exponentially, making it harder to absorb the shocks of warfare.

You don’t torture people. You don’t indiscriminately attack civilians. You protect as good as you can the impact of your warfare on women and children.

Short-termism is no longer an option. We have to envisage humanitarian action with a medium- and long-term perspective.

Although the ICRC and the World Economic Forum have separate missions, they both are centred on collaboration across sectors and between various actors in order to improve the state of the world.

I think we are challenged in how we define humanitarian action today and how we relate to long-term needs. We are also confronted with legitimate expectations from the people who want us to respond far more thoroughly to their basic pleas than we would have done in a much more contained form of conflict.

Even in war, everyone deserves to be treated humanely.

Suffering does not change its face.

Humanitarian action cannot be held hostage to political ends.

The abuse of civilians and combatants has existed since the dawn of time.

You can’t expect humanitarian and development agencies to rebuild Syria. There is not enough money. There is not enough capacity. There are not enough skills.

Cities are drivers of growth and wealth, and at the same time, cities are becoming increasingly violent.