Humanitarian Action

Humanitarian Action (Russian: Гуманитарное действие) is a non-governmental charitable organization based in St. Petersburg, Russia. Humanitarian Action carries out programs and outreach for HIV/AIDS prevention, and aiding street children, intravenous drug users, and sex workers. The program, founded in June 2001, grew out of the French NGO Doctors of the World, which created medical-social programs in Russia starting in 1995.

Mission and Philosophy

Humanitarian Action works to slow the spread of HIV infection and other socially important diseases, maintaining the accessibility of medical, social and psychological treatment, and help HIV positive people, abandoned children, intravenous drug users and sex workers reintegrate with society, as well as aiding those at risk for violence, trafficking and discrimination.

Humanitarian Action is founded on a principle of accessibility, making sure that at-risk groups can use governmental and non-governmental public services and working to resolve social problems. Much of their work is directed towards the acknowledgement and protection of at-risk individuals' human rights.

Action

Action may refer to:

Businesses and organizations

Technology and mathematics

Humanitarianism

Humanitarianism is a moral of kindness, benevolence, and sympathy extended to all human beings. Humanitarianism has been an evolving concept historically but universality is a common theme in its evolution. No distinction is to be made on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, race, caste, age, religion, ability, or nationality.

Social reform

The historian G. M. Trevelyan viewed humanitarianism as the product of rationalism upon Puritanism. However, in many areas of reform, Christians and rationalists worked together: in the case of slavery, William Wilberforce and the Buxtons, but also Jeremy Bentham and Condorcet; in the case of working conditions, evangelicals such as Lord Shaftesbury, but also Robert Owen and Edwin Chadwick; in the case of punishments, Cesare Beccaria and Samuel Romilly; in the case of the mentally ill, Shaftesbury and Pinel; and in the case of the treatment of animals, Bentham enlisted the aid of Wilberforce. The idea that mankind could be improved by deliberate social change distinct from the conferring of charity was relatively new.

International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement

The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is an international humanitarian movement with approximately 97 million volunteers, members and staff worldwide which was founded to protect human life and health, to ensure respect for all human beings, and to prevent and alleviate human suffering.

The movement consists of several distinct organizations that are legally independent from each other, but are united within the movement through common basic principles, objectives, symbols, statutes and governing organisations. The movement's parts are:

Humanitarian aid

Humanitarian aid is material and logistic assistance to people in need. It is usually short-term help until the long-term help by government and other institutions replaces it. Among the people in need belong homeless, refugees, victims of natural disasters, wars and famines. The primary purpose of humanitarian aid is to save lives, reduce suffering and respect to human dignity. Humanitarian aid is material or logistical assistance provided for humanitarian purposes, typically in response to humanitarian crises including natural disasters and man-made disaster. The primary objective of humanitarian aid is to save lives, alleviate suffering, and maintain human dignity. It may therefore be distinguished from development aid, which seeks to address the underlying socioeconomic factors which may have led to a crisis or emergency.

According to The Overseas Development Institute, a London-based research establishment, whose findings were released in April 2009 in the paper 'Providing aid in insecure environments:2009 Update', the most lethal year in the history of humanitarianism was 2008, in which 122 aid workers were murdered and 260 assaulted. Those countries deemed least safe were Somalia and Afghanistan. In 2012, Humanitarian Outcomes reports that the countries with the highest incidents were: Afghanistan, South Sudan, Syria, Pakistan and Somalia.