HRW Encourages UN Ban of Autonomous Weapons
“Fully autonomous weapons would go a step beyond existing remote-controlled drones as they would be able to select and engage targets without meaningful human control,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report released Thursday. Release of the report comes…
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before the issue is to be addressed at a UN multilateral meeting in Geneva April 13-17, HRW said. While the “killer robots” don't exist yet, “the rapid movement of technology in that direction has attracted international attention and concern," HRW said, since “programmers, manufacturers, and military personnel could all escape liability for unlawful deaths and injuries caused by fully autonomous weapons, or ‘killer robots,’” HRW said. HRW is a co-founder of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, which is an international coalition of more than 50 nongovernmental organizations that calls for a “preemptive ban on the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons.” HRW Senior Arms Division Researcher Bonnie Docherty, also the report’s lead author, said a “fully autonomous weapon could commit acts that would rise to the level of war crimes if a person carried them out, but victims would see no one punished for these crimes.” Docherty, also a lecturer at the Harvard Law School clinic, said calling war crimes committed by “killer robots” an “accident” or “glitch” would “trivialize the deadly harm they could cause.”