Academic literature on the topic 'UN. Human Rights Council. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions'

This chapter explores ethical challenges potentially arising from AI-controlled drones, focusing on how their use might be restrained through international legal regulation. The starting point is the 2013 recommendation of a moratorium on the production of lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) to the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council by its Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. The response by UN member states to this recommendation was to resolve that relevant discussions should occur within the framework of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). However, the critical problem identified in this chapter is that the introduction of CCW-based regulation requires consensus among all the treaty’s members. Thus, to achieve principled and legally-binding restraints on the use of autonomous armed drones, scholars and policy practitioners need to confront a set of challenges to multilateral consensus. These challenges include: threats to multilateralism in arms-control generally; ongoing concerns about a military AI arms race; anti-activist sentiments and ‘banphobia’ among arms-control diplomats; and differing international understandings of what moral values are applicable to the deployment of autonomous weapons systems.