Do we need new international law for autonomous weapons?
▻https://www.defensenews.com/unmanned/2018/04/10/do-we-need-new-international-law-for-autonomous-weapons
/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-mco.s3.amazonaws.com/public/AUJ3XDYQCFBLNKHXCKZFLZTHFE.jpg)
As the United States, Russia and China continue to push forward in their development of unmanned autonomous weapon systems, questions surrounding how these new weapons will be governed and regulated are becoming more salient.
This week, parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) will be meeting at the Hague to discuss the definition of “meaningful human control,” a term that is central to the ongoing regulation discussion.
But for some legal experts, the bigger question is “whether the international community as a whole will demand compliance with any legal developments in Geneva on autonomous weapons, or compliance with the existing law we already have that’s implicated with this new technology,” Mary Ellen O’Connor, professor of law at the Notre Dame Law School, said last Thursday during a keynote address at the Brookings Institution. “We have the UN charter and other principles restricting the use of military force, we have principles of international humanitarian law to govern combat on the battlefield and we have human rights law. It’s all relevant.”
We’re running out of time to stop killer robot weapons.
▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/11/killer-robot-weapons-autonomous-ai-warfare-un
It’s five years this month since the launch of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a global coalition of non-governmental groups calling for a ban on fully autonomous weapons. This month also marks the fifth time that countries have convened at the United Nations in Geneva to address the problems these weapons would pose if they were developed and put into use.
The countries meeting in Geneva this week are party to a major disarmament treaty called the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. While some diplomatic progress has been made under that treaty’s auspices since 2013, the pace needs to pick up dramatically. Countries that recognise the dangers of fully autonomous weapons cannot wait another five years if they are to prevent the weapons from becoming a reality.
Fully autonomous weapons, which would select and engage targets without meaningful human control, do not yet exist, but scientists have warned they soon could. Precursors have already been developed or deployed as autonomy has become increasingly common on the battlefield. Hi-tech military powers, including China, Israel, Russia, South Korea, the UK and the US, have invested heavily in the development of autonomous weapons. So far there is no specific international law to halt this trend.