The international community must impose a moratorium on robot weapons, a UN expert told the world body’s top human rights forum on Thursday, warning that they could enable war crimes to go unpunished.
“Human rights requires that human beings should in one way or another retain meaningful control over weapons of war,” Christof Heyns said in a debate at the UN Human Rights Council on lethal autonomous robots, or LARs.
As a result, nations should “declare and implement national moratoria on the production, assembly, transfer, acquisition, deployment and use of LARs until a framework on the future of LARs has been established”.
“Their deployment may be unacceptable because no adequate system of legal accountability can be devised,” said Heyns, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.
Such weapons are a step up from drones – unmanned aircraft controlled from far-distant bases – over which controversy is raging notably due to civilian casualties when the United States uses them to kill alleged al-Qaeda militants.
“While drones have a ‘human in the loop’, who takes the decision to deploy lethal force, the new technology of LARs involves an on-board computer that takes these decisions on its own,” explained Heyns.
“No state is currently using fully autonomous weapons that would classify as LARs, but the technology is already available,” he said.