UN and Red Cross want treaty to restrict the use of autonomous weapons

A The UN and the Red Cross have today asked the international community to start negotiating a treaty restricting the use of autonomous weapons in the war in anticipation of discussions on this type of weapon next week.

“ The international community must now make fundamental decisions on the future of armed conflicts,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said in a statement that “a machine should never have the power to decide whether a human being lives or dies.”.

In similar terms, the chairman of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Mirjana Spoljaric, expressed herself in another communiqué, stressing that the development and proliferation of autonomous weapons without global standards and concrete human control should not be allowed.

Between 16 and 20 November, the VII Review Conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons is held in Geneva, Switzerland, a meeting in which representatives of the 128 States Parties, including the major powers, examine the application of their protocols.

The meeting, at which all types of arms subject to international standards are addressed, was particularly important because of repeated calls for a legally binding instrument to regulate autonomous weapons systems.

The future of these weapons has been debated under the convention for a decade, without the official start of negotiations being announced so far, although there are expectations that this will happen next week, despite the reluctance of powers such as the United States or Russia.

The urgency of opening negotiations, according to observers, increases as autonomous arms begin to proliferate in current conflicts such as those of Ukraine, the Middle East or Sudan.

According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, “given the rapid pace of technological development and the risk that autonomous weapons systems may be widely available in the near future, the deadline for drawing up a treaty that regulates them is rapidly running out”.

The President of the CICR recalled that previous international treaties have demonstrated that it is possible to effectively prohibit or restrict “the most unacceptable weapons”, such as chemical and biological weapons, anti-personnel mines or dispersal ammunition.

With the invasion of Ukraine by Russia the use of drones and other autonomous weapons with artificial intelligence has proliferated, completely transforming the battlefield and the usual way wars were conducted.