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As Drones Enter Battlefields Worldwide, Call Grows for Global Ban on Killer Robots
"Without explicit legal rules, the world faces a grim future of automated killing that will place civilians everywhere in grave danger," one human rights expert said.
Aug 26, 2024
As drone warfare continues to proliferate worldwide and concerns grow over the use of artificial intelligence by militaries, Human Rights Watch on Monday backed United Nations' Secretary-General António Guterres' call for an international treaty to ban "killer robots" that select and attack targets without human oversight.
In an August 6 report, Guterres urged the international community to negotiate a treaty prohibiting lethal autonomous weapons systems by 2026. This is a widely supported idea, as 47 of the 58 submissions to the report from more than 73 countries endorsed either a ban or increased regulations.
"The U.N, secretary-general emphasizes the enormous detrimental effects removing human control over weapons systems would have on humanity," Mary Wareham, deputy crisis, conflict, and arms director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. "The already broad international support for tackling this concern should spur governments to start negotiations without delay."
The momentum behind a ban is building as armies around the world are increasingly deploying and testing militarized robots and drones. The U.S. military became the first nation to widely deploy drone warfare during its War on Terror campaigns in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Iraq following the attacks of 9/11. But today, from Israel's use of drones in Gaza and the West Bank to China and Russia's growing arsenals, the use of remotely operated weapons is rapidly expanding.
Ukraine War
HRW's call came the same day that Russia launched an attack on Ukrainian energy infrastructure using around 200 missiles and drones. The attack killed at least five people and knocked out power and water in several parts of the country, Reuters reported.
"It was one of the biggest combined strikes. More than a hundred missiles of various types and about a hundred Shahed drones. And like most previous Russian strikes, this one is just as sneaky, targeting critical civilian infrastructure," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Telegram.
Ukraine has also used long-range attack drones against Russia, targeting sites such as oil refineries and military airfields.
North Korea
Also on Monday, North Korean state media reported that the country's leader Kim Jong Un had supervised a test of a North Korean attack drone.
Pictures showed a drone colliding with a target that looked like a South Korean K-2 main battle tank and obliterating it an a fiery explosion.
The North Korean test coincides with increased tensions with South Korea and the U.S. as well as a joint exercise by the two countries to prepare their militaries for a potential conflict with North Korea.
Noting their importance in modern warfare, Kim said he wanted North Korea to be equipped with drones "as soon as possible" and urged the manufacturing of several types including exploding drones, attack drones, and underwater suicide drones, according to North Korean state media.
China/Taiwan
Drones featured in another global hot spot as China sent two drones over the sea between Taiwan and Japan's westernmost island of Yonaguni on Friday, as the Joint Staff Office under Japan's Defense Ministry observed.
China's move followed two actions by the U.S. military: the first ever U.S. Marine Corps deployment of a radar capable of sensing aerial threats including drones from Yonaguni on July 29 during exercises and the sending of the destroyer USS Ralph Johnson to the Taiwan Strait on Thursday.
Gaza
Israel has also used drones "systematically" in its ongoing war on Gaza.
In a February report, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said it had confirmed that dozens of civilians had been killed by "small killer drones," including the Matrice 600 and LANIUS models. The drones were equipped with explosives, machine guns, and artificial intelligence.
"Israel is intentionally using them to target Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip," Euro-Med said, adding that "the majority of Israel's targeting takes place in public spaces where it is easy to distinguish fighters from civilians."
Summit of the Future
World leaders will have a chance to curb the proliferation of drones in warfare in New York in September, when they will convene at U.N. headquarters for the Summit of the Future, an initiative of Guterres.
The summit is expected to produce a "Pact for the Future," the current draft of which recommends acting "with urgency" toward international control of killer robots.
"The Summit of the Future provides an important opportunity for states to express high-level support for opening negotiations to ban and restrict autonomous weapons systems," Wareham said. "Without explicit legal rules, the world faces a grim future of automated killing that will place civilians everywhere in grave danger."
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Hundreds of Legal Experts Push Biden to Drop 'Punitive and Deadly' Sanctions
"Hundreds of millions of civilians around the world suffer—and hundreds of thousands have died—even in times of ostensible peace under the broad economic sanctions imposed unilaterally and illegally by the United States."
Aug 12, 2024
As human rights defenders marked the 75th anniversary of the Fourth Geneva Convention and its prohibition on collective punishment, hundreds of legal experts and groups on Monday urged the global community—and the United States government in particular—"to comply with international law by ending the use of broad, unilateral coercive measures that extensively harm civilian populations."
In a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden, the jurists and legal groups wrote that "75 years ago, in the aftermath of one of the most destructive conflicts in human history, nations of the world came together in Geneva, Switzerland to establish clear legal limits on the treatment of noncombatants in times of war."
"The legal community needs to push back against the narrative that sanctions are nonviolent alternatives to warfare."
"One key provision... is the prohibition of collective punishment, which is considered a war crime," the letter continues. "We consider the unilateral application of certain economic sanctions to constitute collective punishment."
Suzanne Adely, president of the National Lawyers Guild—one of the letter's signatories—said in a statement that "economic sanctions cause direct material harm not only to the people living on the receiving end of these policies, but to those who rely on trade and economic relations with sanctioned countries."
"The legal community needs to push back against the narrative that sanctions are nonviolent alternatives to warfare and hold the U.S. Government accountable for violating international law every time it wields these coercive measures," she added.
The new letter states:
Collective punishment is a standard practice of U.S. foreign policy today in the form of broad, unilateral economic and financial sanctions. While other countries apply sanctions in some form, the United States imposes more unilateral economic sanctions than any other country in the world, by far. Though this method of collective punishment may differ from that of conventional warfare, and is often applied outside of declared military conflict, its collective impact on civilians can be just as indiscriminate, punitive, and deadly.
"Hundreds of millions of people currently live under such broad U.S. economic sanctions in some form, including in notable cases such as Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela," the letter notes. "The evidence that these measures can cause severe, widespread civilian harm, including death, is overwhelming. Broad economic sanctions can spark and prolong economic crises, hinder access to essential goods like food, fuel, and medicine, and increase poverty, hunger, disease, and even death rates, especially among children. Such conditions in turn often drive mass migration, as in the recent cases of Cuba and Venezuela."
For more than 64 years, the U.S. has imposed a crippling economic embargo on Cuba that had adversely affected all sectors of the socialist island's economy and severely limited Cubans' access to basic necessities including food, fuel, and medicines. The Cuban government
claims the blockade cost the country's economy nearly $5 billion in just one 11-month period in 2022-23 alone. For the past 32 years, United Nations member states have voted overwhelmingly against the U.S. embargo on Cuba. Last year's vote was 187-2, with the U.S. and Israel as the only dissenters.
According to a 2019 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a progressive think tank based in Washington, D.C., as many as 40,000 Venezuelans died from 2017-18 to U.S. sanctions, which have made it much more difficult for millions of people to obtain food, medicine, and other necessities.
"Civilian suffering is not merely an incidental cost of these policies, but often their very intent," the new letter asserts. "A 1960 State Department memo on the embargo of Cuba suggested 'denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government.'"
"Civilian suffering is not merely an incidental cost of these policies, but often their very intent."
"Asked whether the Trump administration's sanctions on Iran were working as intended, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded that 'things are much worse for the Iranian people, and we're convinced that will lead the Iranian people to rise up and change the behavior of the regime,'" the signers added.
Experts have repeatedly noted that while sanctions harm everyday people in targeted countries, leaders of those nations use their positions as dictators to enrich themselves and members of their inner circles. Sanctions also fail to work as intended to topple targeted regimes. Cuba's revolutionary government has outlasted a dozen U.S. presidents. Iran has been under U.S. sanctions since the late 1970s, yet its Islamic regime remains entrenched and has forged closer relations with Russia and China. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is still in power despite two decades of U.S. sanctions. North Korea's dynastic dictatorship shows no signs of cracking after seven decades of sanctions.
Others have highlighted the hypocrisy of the United States sanctioning nations over ideological differences while supporting brutal dictatorships including Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, and Equatorial Guinea, and other gross human rights violators like apartheid Israel, which is on trial for genocide at the World Court. Instead of punishing Israel, the U.S. House of Representatives—with the assent of dozens of Democratic lawmakers—passed legislation to sanction officials of the International Criminal Court, whose chief prosecutor is seeking to arrest Israeli and Hamas leaders.
"The Geneva Conventions, for all of their limitations and subsequent violations, were a triumph of international law in the protection of civilians during times of war," the new letter asserts. "Yet today, hundreds of millions of civilians around the world suffer—and hundreds of thousands have died—even in times of ostensible peace under the broad economic sanctions imposed unilaterally and illegally by the United States."
"As members of the legal community, we call on the United States to comply with existing international law by ending the use of broad unilateral coercive measures," the signers added. "Seventy-five years after the Geneva Conventions, collective punishment must end."
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Biden’s Trilateral Camp David Summit Advanced Preparation for War with China
The summit’s much ballyhooed commitment to nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation serves more to manufacture consent for preparations for nuclear war than to reduce nuclear dangers.
Aug 21, 2023
Meeting in a summit at Camp David on August 18, President Joe Biden, President Yoon Suk Yeol
of South Korea, and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan posed for photos that confirmed and broadcast a long-term trilateral alliance designed to reinforce containment of China, Russia, and North Korea.
The architect of this updated alliance structure was the coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs in President Biden’s National Security Council, Kurt Campbell. In an earlier incarnation, he served as former President Barack Obama’s assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs who then led the greatest U.S. post-Cold War foreign and military transition: the pivot to Asia and the Pacific to contain and manage China’s rise. Now as he has nurtured the consolidation of the U.S.-Japan-South Korea military alliance to reinforce the pivot and to augment the AUKUS (Australia, British-U.S.) and QUAD (U.S., Japan, Australia, India) alliances in Washington’s long march to create a NATO-like Indo-Pacific alliance system. TheNew York Timesheadlined that the three-pact way will serve as a “bulwark” against China and North Korea.
Prior to the summit, Campbell announced that the August 18 summit would feature “a very ambitious set of initiatives that seek to lock in trilateral engagement, both now and into the future,” addressing “many sectors—in the security realm, in technology, and education.” In this regard, it should be recalled that the Biden National Security strategy recognizes that the U.S. cannot unilaterally maintain its global dominance, and that doing so requires alliances that integrate military, technological, and economic resources. And while there is anything but equality among the alliance partners, Japanese and South Korean elites enjoy influence and power they would not have on their own.
With these military systems in place and the almost daily provocative military “exercises” by all parties involved, an accident or miscalculation on the Korean Peninsula or in relation to Taiwan could easily escalate into a regional, even nuclear, war.
Little understood across the United States, there are two competing triangular military, economic, and technological pacts in Northeast Asia. These contending military systems, plus the Taiwan and Korean flash points, make the region, along with Ukraine, the most likely trigger for escalation to regional, and potentially nuclear, war. Each of these increasingly integrated triangular systems, the U.S.-Japan-Republic of Korea (ROK) alliance and the China-Russia-Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) quasi alliance, has its fault lines. With Japan yet to fully face and apologize for its brutal history of colonial conquest and rule in Korea (think forced labor and systemic military prostitution in the first half of the 20th century), and with widespread resentment over unpopular ROK president Yoon’s kowtowing to Tokyo and Washington, not to mention Seoul being Beijing’s second largest national trade partner, South Korea is the weak link in the U.S.-led alliance. On the other side, as we see in the Ukraine War, Beijing’s commitment to Moscow is not “unlimited.”
As referenced above, with these military systems in place and the almost daily provocative military “exercises” by all parties involved, an accident or miscalculation on the Korean Peninsula or in relation to Taiwan could easily escalate into a regional, even nuclear, war.
Global and domestic political forces led to transforming what was long a hub (U.S.) and spokes (allied partners) alliance system to the more integrated system it is becoming. At its heart lies the Biden Administration’s National Security Strategy’s dictat that “the post-Cold War era is definitively over, and a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next.” Second are fears that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could signal an end to the post World War II/United Nations order in which national boundaries and sovereignty are for the most part respected. (The U.S. invasions of Indochina, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Panama being significant exceptions to the so-called “rules based order!”)
The alliance consolidation also takes place at a time when the Kishida government has opted to totally disregard Japan’s war-renouncing constitution. Being the world’s 10th largest military spender was not sufficient for those who fear China’s rise and North Korea’s missiles and wanted to restore Japan’s military grandeur. Kishida has committed to doubling the Self-Defense Forces budget. In harmony with U.S. alliance building, and to prepare for a time when the U.S. may reduce its Asia-Pacific commitments, Japan is deepening “security” cooperation with Australia, the Philippines, India, and Taiwan and is engaging in joint military operations as far afield as the South China Sea. That these commitments suggest the possible reprising of Tokyo’s early 20th century history as a major regional military power unsettles Beijing and some Asia-Pacific neighbors.
In Korea, the unpopular President Yoon is ruling in the tradition of Donald Trump, ignoring popular opinion, relying on his narrow but loyal right-wing base, and trading his threats to develop nuclear weapons and swallowing unresolved Japanese abuses to deepen U.S. and Japanese alliance commitments. With North Korea augmenting its nuclear arsenal and increasing the pace of its missile tests—even as the U.N. reports increased starvation in the DPRK—Seoul is hardly alone in accelerating the pace of Korean militarization. Add to this the joint Chinese-Russian naval exercises in the Sea of Japan and Asahi Shimbun’s reports that Beijing is tightening its military encirclement of Taiwan.
Among the trilateral agreements just secured at Camp David are the “commitment to consult” when “something that poses a threat to any one of us poses a threat” to the three nations—just short of NATO’s Article 5 commitment to mutual defense. Also agreed were greater intelligence sharing, annual military exercises, deepening cooperation and interdependence on missile defenses (which can provide defense but also serve as shields to reinforce first-strike nuclear swords), collaborative technological development, a framework to further integrate Southeast Asian nations into the trilateral military structure, a hotline, and annual trilateral meetings among national security advisors for “institutionalizing, deepening, and thickening the habits of cooperation” among the allies.
Decades ago, many of us sang, “When will they ever learn?” When indeed!
The summit’s much ballyhooed commitment to nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation serves more to manufacture consent for preparations for nuclear war than to reduce nuclear dangers. As we saw in the recent G7 summit, the U.S. and Japan remain committed to “nuclear deterrence.” And the nonproliferation commitment may have more to do with preventing South Korea’s and Japan’s military from becoming nuclear powers than a commitment to fulfilling their Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) commitments. (Article VI of the NPT requires the original nuclear powers to engage in good faith negotiations for the complete elimination of their nuclear arsenals, which they have refused to do for 50 years. And, for 60 years, Japan’s military has asserted its right to possess nuclear weapons, and South Korean polls indicate that a majority support Seoul developing nuclear weapons.)
Decades ago, many of us sang, “When will they ever learn?” When indeed! Former Australian Prime Minister, now ambassador to the United States, Kevin Rudd, warns that we are marching toward a catastrophic and avoidable war. At the height of the last Cold War, U.S., Soviet, and European elites opted for the paradigm of Common Security diplomacy to halt and reverse the spiraling and increasingly terrifying nuclear arms race. They ended the Cold War on the basis of the recognition that security cannot be achieved by taking increasingly militarized actions against their rival, that it can only be won through difficult diplomacy that acknowledges each side’s fears and resolves and addresses them with win-win, mutually beneficial compromises and agreements.
Earlier this summer Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen observed that the world is big enough for both the U.S. and China. Let’s build on that insight, press U.S. and other leaders to engage in Common Security diplomacy, and stop wasting trillions of dollars in preparation for apocalyptic war and devote our all too limited resources to meeting human needs, including reversing that other existential threat: the climate emergency.
An earlier version of this article said that Kurt Campbell served as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under former President Bill Clinton. He actually filled this role under former President Barack Obama, and the piece has been corrected to reflect this.
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