AWS Diplomacy Report, Vol. 2, No. 1
Editorial: To Live Long and Prosper, We Must Ban Autonomous Weapons
7 May 2025
Laura Varella | Reaching Critical Will, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
On 12–13 May 2025, delegations will meet at the United Nations (UN) in New York for an informal consultation on lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). Amidst growing militarism and the dismantling of multilateralism, this is a crucial moment to advance ongoing discussions of a treaty prohibiting autonomous weapons.
Time of increasing militarism
A quick glance of recent news reveals that we are facing challenging times. The genocide of Palestinians is ongoing, despite calls from states, the UN, civil society, and people worldwide against Israel’s actions. The new administration in the United States (US) has declared war against immigrants, trans and nonbinary people, and all those opposing the new government and its discriminatory policies. With increasing geopolitical tensions, states are resorting to militarism: the European Union (EU), Australia, China, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, the United Kingdom (UK), and many others have announced their intention to increase their military budgets.
Against this harrowing scenario, the arms industry is thriving. In addition to the traditional companies that have been fuelling the military-industrial-complex in the last decades, there are new actors at play. The tech industry is increasing its influence over governments, securing highly profitable government contracts. In this context, autonomous weapon systems become critical: companies want to make profit out of their development, and governments want to acquire them, motivated by an arms race logic.
Just in recent months, the US-based company Anduril announced that it is building a 1 billion USD factory that could “eventually produce tens of thousands of autonomous systems and weapons each year.” The company is also involved in partnership between the US and India to develop maritime drones and counter-drone systems. Companies from the Republic of Korea, Türkiye, and many other countries are also developing weapons with increasing levels of autonomy.
However, there is no shortage of concerns regarding autonomous weapons. Many experts have been warning against the range of legal, ethical, and humanitarian problems arising from these systems. In a racist, colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist world, which is facing growing fascist trends, autonomous weapons can only be usedas tools to divide, subjugate, and control, resulting in ongoing war and suffering.
Nevertheless, there are many who have been fighting to prevent our reality from becoming the plot of futuristic cyberpunk movie. States, international organisations, civil society, and academia have been engaging in multilateral discussions about autonomous weapons for over a decade. Throughout these years, they have built a rich body of knowledge around these systems. Now it is time to move forward and take the next step: starting negotiations of a legally binding instrument prohibiting autonomous weapons.
Background of discussions at the UN about AWS
Autonomous weapon systems (AWS) have been discussed in the United Nations for over a decade. In 2013, Christof Heyns, then UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, first warned about the concerns around autonomous weapons in a report to the Human Rights Council. That same year, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) decided to convene in 2014 an Informal Meeting of Experts to “discuss the questions related to emerging technologies in the area of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS).” In 2016, the CCW established the Group of Governmental Experts on Emerging Technologies in the Area of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (GGE on LAWS). Since then, the Group has been meeting annually, but it has not managed to start negotiations of a legally binding instrument on autonomous weapons, despite the majority of states supporting this.
The current mandate of the Group, adopted in 2023, is to “further consider and formulate, by consensus, a set of elements of an instrument in the area of lethal autonomous weapons systems.” According to the mandate, the GGE needs to submit a report to the Seventh Review Conference of the CCW in 2026, but it should complete its work as soon as possible, preferably before the end of 2025. With the deadline fast approaching, there are concerns about whether the GGE will successfully fulfil its mandate, or more importantly, if it will ever start formal negotiations of a legally binding instrument. These negotiations have been consistently blocked by a handful of heavily militarised states, including Russia, Israel, India, Australia, the Republic of Korea, and the United States.
These states have adopted several actions that have been detrimental to the majority’s wish of negotiating an international treaty on AWS. Some of them have stalled and/or prevented substantive discussions using procedural arguments; objected to the participation of observers, which includes civil society, academia, intergovernmental and international organisations; threatened to block the adoption of reports unless certain conditions were met; tried to narrow down the scope of discussions to only international humanitarian law (IHL), excluding other areas of international law, such as international human rights law (IHRL) and international criminal law, as well as ethical considerations; and tried to create loopholes by insisting on keeping the term “lethal” in the characterisation of AWS, which could result in excluding weapons used to damage objects or to cause injury.
All this has been possible because the CCW operates under the consensus rule, which has been interpreted as a “veto power” by some states. When they don’t agree with a discussion or decision, they prevent it from happening by not joining consensus, even if this means going against the wish of the majority.
Luckily, multilateral discussions have not been restricted to the CCW. In recent years, there have been several international and regional conferences related to AWS, including the Responsible AI in the Military Domain Summit (REAIM 2023) in the Hague, the Netherlands on 15–16 February 2023; the Latin American and the Caribbean Conference of Social and Humanitarian Impact of Autonomous Weapons in Belén, Costa Rica on 23–24 February 2023; the CARICOM Conference: The Human Impacts of Autonomous Weapons in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago on 5–6 September 2023; the Manila Meeting on Indo-Pacific Perspectives on Autonomous Weapons Systems in the Philippines on 13–14 December 2023; the Inaugural Plenary Meeting for the Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy in the United States on 19–20 March 2024; the Regional Conference on the Peace and Security Aspect of Autonomous Weapons Systems: An ECOWAS Perspective in Freetown, Sierra Leone on 17–18 April 2024; the 2024 Vienna Conference on Autonomous Weapons Systems in Austria on 29–30 April 2024; and the Responsible AI in the Military Domain Summit (REAIM 2024) in Seoul, Republic of Korea on 9–10 September 2024.
In 2023, the General Assembly adopted the first resolution on AWS, which mandated the UN Secretary-General (UNSG) to seek the views of states, civil society, academia, and others about LAWS, and submit a report to the General Assembly. The UNSG published his report in August 2024, in which he reiterated his call for the conclusion, by 2026, of a legally binding instrument to prohibit and regulate autonomous weapon systems.
In 2024, the General Assembly adopted a new resolution, this time to have informal consultations on AWS. This meeting is an opportunity to build on the discussions held in the GGE and elsewhere and to advocate for the start of negotiations of a treaty banning AWS.
Opportunities at the informal consultation
The upcoming informal consultation will provide an inclusive space for civil society to participate actively, along with states that do not have representation at the GGE in Geneva because they are not party to the CCW.
The consultation will also be a great opportunity to discuss critical issues that remain missing from the current debate at the GGE. According to the programme, the meeting is structured around sessions about humanitarian, legal, security, technological, and ethical considerations. Under these sessions, participants can highlight their concerns around human rights, international criminal law, risk of proliferation, use of AWS by domestic law enforcement, environmental impacts, and more.
An important issue that needs to be further discussed is a prohibition of anti-personnel AWS. In the last GGE meeting, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Stop Killer Robots, the Holy See, and Mexico reiterated their views that the Group should consider an explicit prohibition on anti-personnel AWS. The ICRC emphasised that this would give clarity for militaries and developers and would have a far greater impact on reducing the risk of strikes against people protected in armed conflict. Stop Killers Robots also underlined that it would be impossible to build a software system that can accurately distinguish combatants from civilians, and raised several other humanitarian and ethical concerns that could only be effectively addressed through a prohibition of anti-personnel systems. The upcoming consultation is a good opportunity to unpack these concerns and defend such a prohibition.
Participants at the informal consultation can also use the opportunity to address the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in military, policing, and border enforcement activities. We are seeing harms from such use already; the use of AI for identifying, targeting, tracking, incarcerating, deporting, and killing people is already happening. Those working on AWS must take into account this reality in our work to prevent further harm and put an end to that already being committed.
Several other issues can and should be raised by states; the recommendations provided by Stop Killer Robots further down in this edition can be useful in this regard. Overall, states should make the most of this opportunity to help building political will towards the start of negotiations of a legally binding instrument on AWS. Like the Star Trek character Spock would say if he participated in UN discussions about autonomous weapons, it is illogical to pursue a technology that risks the well-being of humanity. As an ambassador himself, he was involved in difficult diplomatic negotiations (all fictional), but never flinched from doing what was right for the world (in his case, the galaxy). To “live long and prosper,” we must do like Spock and act now to secure a future free from autonomous weapons.
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