Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining

The GICHD enables its partners to reduce risks to communities from explosive ordnance by furthering knowledge, promoting norms and standards, developing capacities, and facilitating dialogue and cooperation.

The GICHD is an international centre of expertise and knowledge, operating in line with humanitarian principles, supporting approximately 40 affected states and territories every year.

They have been developed to improve safety and efficiency in mine action by providing guidance, establishing principles and, in some cases, by defining international requirements and specifications.

They provide a frame that encourages the sponsors and managers of mine action programmes and projects to achieve and demonstrate agreed levels of effectiveness and safety.

The IMAS are a framework for the development of national mine action standards (NMAS), which can more accurately reflect specific local realities and circumstances in a given country.

The ISU's duties include providing support and advice to the Presidency of the Meetings of the State Parties and to Standing Committee Co-chairs, communicating information about the Convention and its implementation, and developing and maintaining a Documentation Centre.

The CCW is a framework convention with five protocols, which ban or restrict the use of various types of weapons that are deemed to cause unnecessary suffering, or affect either soldiers or civilians indiscriminately.

The Centre has an observer status and assists High Contracting Parties, at their request, in their efforts to minimise human suffering caused by landmines, booby traps and other devices, explosive remnants of war and cluster munitions, which are covered by the ongoing work of the CCW and its Group of Governmental Experts.

[1] GICHD's headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland in the maison de la paix building (the house of peace), which is owned by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.