First, here is an actual article about the “controversy.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/russia-dangles-prospect-of-safe-corridors-ukraine-skeptical/2022/03/08/e7a9f746-9e9e-11ec-9438-255709b6cddc_story.html
Second, here is a link to a summary of the Geneva Conventions (plural) that comes from a trusted legal source, not ICRC’s website that is written to promote the protection of its trademark and to make it sound like the Rules of the Geneva Conventions are all about them. Notably, the use of the red cross, crescent, and diamond is reserved to signify neutral status and protection of medical services and volunteers.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/geneva_conventions_and_their_additional_protocols
Third, here’s a link to the one HONEST ICRC page about protection of the Red Cross logo, in which it explains that it’s all about copyright protection:
https://www.icrc.org/en/copyright-and-terms-use
Russia and Ukraine are both signatories of the 4 Geneva Conventions and Protocol 1. https://www.rulac.org/browse/conflicts/international-armed-conflict-in-ukraine#collapse3accord
To summarize the situation: The original Geneva Convention in 1864 was initiated by a group of people who became the actual ICRC, to protect the Red Cross as a symbol of neutral status and protection of medical services and volunteers in wartime.
The Geneva Conventions are treaties. Their application is not universal, because not all countries have signed the conventions. Treaties only (theoretically, since actual international enforcement of treaties is dicey at best) apply to the signatories.
The use of the symbols of the Red Cross, crescent, and diamond are reserved for these aid activities, NOT FOR THE USE BY THE ICRC ITSELF, under the conventions. The ICRC actually causes a problem by trademarking these symbols all over the world for its personal use. On one hand, there is a good reason to do so, to prevent the symbols from being used so widely that they are no longer reserved for aid activities and can not be trusted to mean just that, anywhere they are used. On the other hand, it lets the ICRC get mighty heavy-handed in protecting its own personal interests rather than the use of the symbols to mean what they’re supposed to mean in combat.
The ICRC itself has only one specific place within the Geneva Conventions - Convention 3 guarantees them the right to offer services in conflicts where, of course, signatories are involved.
So what does this all mean?
Getting civilians out of a city to a safe zone during active Russian attack on the city is definitely an aid activity for civilians. Is it truly neutral? Lots of ways to argue that if the buses weren’t arranged by a neutral 3rd party, but the corridors were arranged between Ukraine and non-combatant nations to evacuate fleeing civilians. There are volunteers involved from multiple nations including Ukraine. But remember, Putin is ignoring any idea of neutrality by using language that anyone who is aiding Ukraine might as well be declaring war. Nothing official in terms of Putin declaring a state of war with Poland, Sweden, et al, but he has thrown the idea of neutrality out the window.
Overall, Zelenskiy and the nations and orgs helping evacuate people from besieged cities would be using the symbol correctly. The ICRC has no claim to sole use of it, or to determine when it can be used, except through a series of trademarks it now jealously protects, because if you don’t protect your trademark, legally you pretty much lose it. That means they have lawyers in every nation OVER-protecting their personal interests, not enforcing use under the Geneva Convention definitions in a neutral manner.
Trademark law is not appropriate for enforcing treaty definitions. It is never created to protect 3rd parties or a symbol/document/whatever that is not property of a person seeking financial profit from it.
Zelenskiy is right to tell the ICRC to shove it, and quit butting its trademark interests into using a symbol in a way that it is intended for ANY non-combatant aid services and volunteers in a time of war.
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