Every Casualty Counts began with a simple conviction: that no one killed in armed violence should vanish from the record. For too long, the dead of the world’s conflicts have been counted loosely, if at all, reduced to estimates and rounded figures that tell us little about who was actually lost. Behind every one of those figures is a person with a name, a family, and a life that mattered. We exist to make sure that person is identified correctly, recorded effectively, and recognised and remembered appropriately.
Today we are the only global organisation focused exclusively on casualty recording. We convene the global Casualty Recorders Network of more than 70 member organisations, we author the Standards for Casualty Recording that guide this work in the field, and we hold Special Consultative Status at the United Nations. But the heart of what we do has not changed since the beginning. It rests on a belief that human dignity should never be compromised, even in death, and that the way a society remembers its dead is central to its humanity.