Government delegates attending next week’s annual meeting of the Convention on Conventional Weapons  (CCW) at the United Nations in Geneva will decide whether to continue in 2015 with multilateral talks on questions relating to “lethal autonomous weapons systems.”

Ambassador Simon-Michel chaired the 2014 experts meeting on lethal autonomous weapons systems and has identified several areas for further study or deliberation in his chair’s report, including:

• The notion of meaningful human control of autonomous weapons systems;
• The key ethical question of delegating the right to decide on life and death to a machine;
• The “various” views on the possibility that autonomous weapons would being able to comply with rules of international law and “different” views on the adequacy of existing law;
• Weapons reviews, including Article 36 of Additional Protocol I (1977) to the 1949 Geneva Conventions;
• The accountability gap, including issue of responsibility at the State level or at an individual level;
• Whether the weapons could change the threshold of use of force

Ref: Decision Time More Talks in 2015? – Campaign to Stop Killer Robots