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Russia and the United States are opposed to negotiations on the use of autonomous weapons that could lead to new international treaties.
Country officials and campaigners have expressed despair over talks by the United Nations on autonomous arms systems, “known as names.”killer robots”- Negotiations for an international treaty were halted in order to govern their use, after being opposed to manufacturing states.
Unlike existing semi-autonomous weapons, such as drones, fully autonomous ones do not have human-induced “killing switches” and instead make decisions about life and death in the hands of sensors, software and machine processes.
Industry regulation has taken on new urgency since a UN report in March said the first autonomous drone attack had taken place in Libya. This week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres encouraged the 125 parties to the Convention on Conventional Arms to draw up an “ambitious plan” for new rules.
But on Friday, the CCW’s Sixth Review Conference held no further discussions on the development and use of the Lethal Autonomous Weapons System or LAW.
Countries already investing in the development of LAWs attended a five-day meeting in Geneva, preventing a majority from agreeing on steps to establish binding rules on machine-gun weapons.
Sources in the talks told Reuters that Russia, India and the United States were among the countries that pushed back a new LAWS treaty. The U.S. has highlighted the benefits of LAW, including accuracy.
“With the current pace of progress, the pace of technological development risks jeopardizing our discussions,” said Swiss Disarmament Ambassador Felix Baumann, who disagreed with the outcome of the UN intergovernmental panel over the past eight years.
Sixty-eight states have demanded a legal instrument from the UN while several NGOs are fighting. unregulated expansion promoting such weapons and new regulations.
Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg and New Zealand Minister for Disarmament and Arms Control Phil Twyford have called for the development of new international laws governing autonomous weapons. The new governing coalition agreements between Norway and Germany have promised to take action on this issue.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was among those who expressed disappointment with the outcome of the talks.
“It’s a real missed opportunity, and not one we think is needed to address the dangers posed by autonomous weapons,” said Neil Davison, a policy adviser in the ICRC’s Legal Division, about the outcome of the week-long talks.
Verity Coyle, Amnesty International’s chief adviser, said “the CCW has once again shown that it cannot make significant progress”.
Campaigners now believe that a separate process from the long-standing UN talks may be needed to ensure future progress on the issue.
“Now is the time for committed states to take the lead in an external process that can provide the kind of progress we have seen in mine and cluster munitions,” Coyle said, adding that the window for regulatory opportunities is shrinking.
Richard Moyes, coordinator of Stop Killer Robots, said governments must “draw a moral and legal line against killing people by machine for humanity.”
“A clear majority of states see the need to ensure meaningful human control over the use of force. Now is the time to guide them to prevent the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of killer robots, ”Moyes said.
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