Red Lion and Sun
The red lion and sun on a white ground was Persia’s sign for the medical services of its armies, recognized in the Geneva Convention of 1929 as one of three distinctive emblems beside the red cross and the red crescent. Iran gave it up for the red crescent in 1980, and it is no longer in use.
Meaning
The Persian, Turkish and Egyptian delegations asked the 1929 Diplomatic Conference to recognize the red crescent and the red lion and sun. To avoid a proliferation of emblems, the conference recognized them only for the three countries that already used them, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) records. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 kept the rule, recognizing the red crescent or the red lion and sun on a white ground “in the case of countries which already use” them, and Protocol III of 2005 still names the distinctive emblems as “the red cross, the red crescent and the red lion and sun”. The ICRC’s casebook says the three have equal status, but the red lion and sun is no longer in use: Iran’s National Society uses the red crescent.
Origin and history
The emblem was argued over from the start. The ICRC’s archive blog records that the Persian relief society adopted the red lion and sun as an alternative to the Red cross, and that the 1906 conference which revised the Convention of 1864 reaffirmed a single emblem while tolerating the red crescent and the red lion and sun. In 1911 the Swiss Federal Council wrote to the United States that the question of the crescent needed settling all the more because other states, “Persia, for instance”, might ask to use other distinctive marks, “the lion, the sun, etc.”. At the 1929 conference the delegate of the United Kingdom warned that admitting several emblems risked confusion, and that if religious significance were attached to the sign, countries using the red cross might replace it with emblems of their own. The conference recognized the three anyway, but only where they were already in use. The historian François Bugnion, as the blog reports him, called it a fundamentally flawed solution that recognized the status quo without letting other National Societies choose the crescent or the lion and sun.
Why Iran gave it up
By a memorandum of 4 September 1980, the legal department of Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the Swiss Embassy in Tehran that, to avoid a proliferation of emblems and to favour their unification, Iran renounced its right to use the “Red Lion and Sun” and would use the “Red Crescent” accepted by all Islamic countries. It reserved the right to resume its emblem should flagrant violations of that rule be noted.
The two ICRC accounts give the condition differently. The memorandum, as the ICRC casebook prints it, speaks of flagrant violations; the ICRC’s history of the emblems says Iran reserved the right to return to the red lion and sun should new emblems be recognized. Governments adopted a new emblem, the red crystal, in Protocol III of 2005, and the same protocol still lists the red lion and sun among the distinctive emblems it reaffirms.
Read next
- Next in Symbols of medicineLamp of Florence NightingaleA lamp is the emblem of nursing, after Florence Nightingale, the “Lady with the Lamp”, who made night rounds of the wards of the army hospital at Scutari during the Crimean War. The lamp she carried there was a lantern, not the oil lamp of many pictures.
- The same shape in Celtic symbolsPictish symbolsA set of recurring signs carved on the stones of the Picts of northern and eastern Scotland from about AD 600: crescents crossed by V-shaped rods, double discs crossed by Z-shaped rods, mirrors and combs, serpents and a swimming beast. Nobody now knows what they meant.
See also
Red cross, Rod of Asclepius, Caduceus, Bowl of Hygieia, Show globe.
Sources
- Red Lion and Sun, How does law protect in war? Online casebook, glossary, International Committee of the Red Cross, Glossary entry
- Iran, Renouncing Use of the Red Lion and Sun Emblem, How does law protect in war? Online casebook, case study (memorandum of 4 September 1980, from Schindler and Toman, The Laws of Armed Conflicts, 4th ed., 2004, p. 663), International Committee of the Red Cross, Case
- The history of the emblems, Article, 14 January 2007, International Committee of the Red Cross, 1876–1878; 1929; 1980; 1992; 2000; 2005; 2007
- A controversial emblem, Cross-Files, the blog of the ICRC Archives, audiovisual and library, International Committee of the Red Cross, Blog post
- Use of emblems, Law and policy, International Committee of the Red Cross, Page text
- The Swiss Minister to the Secretary of State, 11 September 1911, with the Turkish Minister for Foreign Affairs to the President of Switzerland, 5 July 1911, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1911, Document 1054, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, Document 1054
- Convention (II) for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea, 12 August 1949, The Avalon Project: Laws of War, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, Articles 41 and 43
- Geneva Conventions Act 1957, Schedule 7: Protocol III additional to the Geneva Conventions, Text of Protocol III (2005) as scheduled to the Act, legislation.gov.uk (UK Government), Preamble; Article 1
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles, curves and waves or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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