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International justice

Map No. 362

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The first Geneva Convention was in 1864. The more recent Geneva Convention, announced on 12th August 1949, is mapped here. This convention demands the protection and respect of individuals who do not (and sometimes cannot) take part in hostilities. This is an important part of international humanitarian law.

Unsurprisingly Switzerland was the first to ratify the convention in March 1950 - Geneva being a Swiss city. Other signatories that year were Monaco, Liechtenstein, Chile and India. By 2004 all territories mapped here were signatories (or the territory claiming sovereignty over them was).

"He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it." Plato, roughly 400 years prior to the Current Era

Territory size is proportional to the number of years a territory has been a signatory of the 1949 Geneva Convention, up to 2006, multiplied by population.

• Open PDF poster, designed for printing. You need Acrobat Reader.
• View labelled territory map or population map for comparison
• Data files: Excel (large with map), Excel (small no map), Opendoc format (see notes)
• Technical notes for this data.
• High Resolution image (see copyright conditions)
• All of the data we use is estimated; see data page