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Report on Activities Report on Activities Convention on Conventional Weapons Group of Governmental Experts meeting on lethal autonomous weapons systems United Nations Geneva 20-21 August 2019 1 About this report This report details activities by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots at the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) meeting of the Group of Governmental Experts on lethal autonomous weapons systems held at the United Nations (UN) in Geneva on 20-21 August 2019. The report records the campaign’s contributions, reviews the participation of governments in these meetings, and its annexes provide a summary of country views and the campaign’s delegation list. Campaign coordinator Mary Wareham and arms associate Jacqulyn Kantack of Human Rights Watch prepared this report, drawing from statements posted online by the CCW implementation support unit and WILPF’s Reaching Critical Will Project. The report also draws on notes of the deliberations taken by Bonnie Docherty of Human Rights Watch and her Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic students Camille Marquis and Daniel Moubayed. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is grateful for the generous donor support that enabled us to have a strong presence at the CCW meetings and to conduct outreach in the lead-up and afterwards. This report is available on the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots website at: www.stopkillerrobots.org/publications. Mary Wareham Washington DC 24 February 2020 2 Contents About this report ........................................................................................................................... 2 Contents......................................................................................................................................... 3 Lead-up to the CCW Group of Governmental Experts Meeting ........................................... 4 CCW Group of Governmental Experts Meeting ...................................................................... 4 Campaign Activities ..................................................................................................................... 6 Annex I: Country Views on Killer Robots .................................................................................. 8 Annex II: Campaign Delegation List ........................................................................................ 10 Annex III: CCW and Related Media Coverage ...................................................................... 13 3 Lead-up to the CCW Group of Governmental Experts Meeting At the CCW’s annual meeting in November 2018, states agreed to continue the work of the Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) established in 2016. They approved Mr. Ljupco Jivan Gjorgjinski of North Macedonia as GGE chair and scheduled two CCW meetings in 2019, on 25-29 March and 20-21 August, in addition to several days of “informal consultations.” There were several events and initiatives on killer robots in the period between the March and August 2019 GGE meetings. The Campaign participated in informal consultations convened by the GGE chair at the UN in Geneva on 15 May, 28 June, 15 August, and 19 August. The Dutch Parliament adopted a resolution on 14 May calling for a legally binding instrument on new weapons technologies, including autonomous weapons. This was followed, on 8 July, with a 19-page declaration issued by parliamentarians from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) urging OSCE states to support negotiations on a new treaty to ban lethal autonomous weapons. CCW Group of Governmental Experts Meeting A total of 94 countries participated in the August 2019 GGE meeting, which is ten more than the attended the previous meeting in March 2019.1 Other participants included UN agency UNIDIR, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, and various academics. This was the eighth CCW meeting on lethal autonomous weapons systems since the talks began in 2014.2 It was the fifth meeting by the Group of Governmental Experts on LAWS established by the 2016 Review Conference to “explore and agree on possible recommendations on options related to emerging technologies in the area of LAWS.” The agenda for the August 2019 GGE meeting built on the reports of the 2017 and 2018 GGE meetings and covered five topics: a) potential challenges posed by emerging technologies in the 1 According to the draft final report issued by the UN on 21 August 2019, the 94 states attending the August meeting were comprised of 88 high contracting parties (Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belarus, Belgium, Benin, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Holy See, Honduras, Hungary, India, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, North Macedonia, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Republic of Korea, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Sierra Leone, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, State of Palestine, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, United States of America, Uruguay, and Venezuela), two signatory states (Egypt and Sudan), and four non-signatories (Haiti, Iran, Mozambique, and Myanmar). 2 Previously, 87 states participated in the last CCW meeting on lethal autonomous weapons systems in March 2019, while 84 attended in April 2018, 90 attended in August 2018, 86 attended in November 2017, 94 attended in 2016, 90 in 2015, and 87 in 2014. 4 area of lethal autonomous weapons systems to international humanitarian law; b) characterization and concepts of the systems under consideration; c) Further consideration of the human element in the use of lethal force and aspects of human-machine interaction; d) review of potential military applications of related technologies; and e) possible options for addressing the humanitarian and international security challenges posed. The GGE chair encouraged states to prepare substantively for the GGE meetings by submitting working papers in advance. The CCW received working papers from Australia, Austria/Brazil/Chile, Brazil, Estonia/Finland, France, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The week opened with an all-day informal consultation by the chair on 19 August. The official GGE meeting began on Tuesday, 20 August 2019. The four three-hour sessions essentially walked through and revised the draft report circulated by the chair prior to the meeting. The conclusions of the report affirmed the guiding principles of the previous meetings in 2018 and agreed to an additional guiding principle on human-machine interaction. Yet again, the issue of “human control” was central to the deliberations. The United States and Russia, along with France, the United Kingdom, and others, opposed any reference to human control within the document. Instead, the phrase “consideration of the human element” is used in the report. States recommended three streams of work to explore going forward on legal, technological, and military concerns, but did not provide any guidance for their work, desired output or plan for integrating the conclusions and identifying overlapping themes. During the meeting, Russia and the United States explicitly rejected any move to negotiate new international law on fully autonomous weapons. Unlike the previous GGE meeting in March 2019, few states called for a political declaration as their desired focus for the GGE’s work. The list of countries calling for a ban on fully autonomous weapons rose to 29 during the meeting, after Jordan called for CCW to negotiate a legally binding instrument to retain meaningful human control. Many of the ban states repeated that position during the meeting, including Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Iraq, and Peru. States agreed that the number of days for discussion in 2019 was insufficient, and many disagreed with the structure of informal consultations, arguing that they were inaccessible to smaller states and those with fewer resources. States recommended that the Group of Governmental Experts meet for a total of 25 days over the course of 2020 and 2021. States also agreed that the Group would adopt two reports during that time, one at the meeting of CCW High Contracting Parties in 2020, and the other at the CCW Sixth Review Conference in 2021. 5 Campaign Activities In the lead-up to the meeting, Campaign representatives discussed killer robots with Luxembourg’s Minister of Defense François Bausch in June 2019. Also in June, the newly- elected Finnish government published a coalition programme that commits Finland to “promote the regulation of autonomous weapons systems via international negotiations” via a ban on “weapons systems based on artificial intelligence.” The Campaign held a regional meeting of its members in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan on 18 April, met with officials at the Southern African Development Community (SADC) headquarters in Gaborone, Botswana in June and launched a Southeast Asia network in Bangkok, Thailand on 3 July. A dozen campaigners from seven countries engaged with states and officials attending the General Assembly
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