Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Monday said that it was seeking a new international treaty to halt the race toward fully autonomous weapons, claiming a growing number of countries wanted an outright ban.
The non-governmental organization (NGO) said 30 countries are explicitly seeking a ban, after compiling an overview of 97 nations with a stated position on the use and development of what it termed “killer robots.”
Most of the 97 want a treaty “to retain human control over the use of force,” New York-based HRW said.
“Weapons systems that select and engage targets without meaningful human control are unacceptable and need to be prevented,” HRW said in its summary of the overview report, released in Geneva, Switzerland.
“All countries have a duty to protect humanity from this dangerous development by banning fully autonomous weapons. Retaining meaningful human control over the use of force is an ethical imperative, a legal necessity, and a moral obligation,” it said.
HRW’s Stopping Killer Robots overview was prepared in time for a Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) meeting that had been scheduled to open in Geneva on Monday.
However, the UN body’s gathering has now been put off until much later in the year.
HRW said that the US and Russia were investing heavily in developing air, land and sea-based autonomous weaponry and were the “most problematic” in blocking a consensus being reached at the CCW.
Though proliferation is not yet widespread, China, Israel, South Korea and certain European nations are also on the move, it said.
It said any ban could come through a new CCW protocol, or a treaty via a “standalone process similar to the initiatives that successfully prohibited anti-personnel landmines in 1997 and cluster munitions in 2008.”
A “growing number of countries” sensed a duty to act on stopping fully autonomous weapons, including Argentina, Brazil, China (use only), Egypt, Iraq, Mexico, Pakistan, the Vatican City and Venezuela, HRW said.
“Many governments share the same serious concerns over permitting machines to take human life on the battlefield, and their desire for human control provides a sound basis for collective action,” said Mary Wareham, HRW’s arms division advocacy director and coordinator of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of more than 160 NGOs.
“While the pandemic has delayed diplomacy, it shows the importance of being prepared and responding with urgency to existential threats to humanity, such as killer robots,” she said.
Steve Goose, director of HRW’s arms division, told reporters at the UN in Geneva that it was not a question of if there would be regulation, but when and how comprehensive it would be.
Via video-link, he said there was growing recognition of the dangers such weapons systems posed to international security, not to mention ethics and the law.
However, “the technology is clearly racing forward whereas some of the diplomatic efforts are stalling” and failing to keep pace, he said.
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
Former Chinese ministers of national defense Wei Fenghe(魏鳳和) and Li Shangfu (李尚福) were both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve over graft charges, state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge in the military. The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad corruption crackdown ordered by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) after coming to power in 2012. The purges reached the elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023. Earlier this year they escalated further, resulting in the removal of the top general in
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
RSS