November 2012

DOD Directive on “Autonomy in Weapons Systems”

At almost the same moment that Human Rights Watch/Harvard Law School Human Rights Clinic released its report, "Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots," which called for states to establish a treaty that would prohibit the "development, production, and use" of "fully autonomous weapons," the Pentagon (under Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter's signature) issued a DOD Directive, "Autonomy in Weapons...

Weekday News Wrap: Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Australia will abstain in the upcoming UN vote on whether to grant non-member state status to Palestine. The body of Yasser Arafat will be exhumed in Ramallah today, to determine whether his death was the result of polonium poisoning. Ehud Barak, Israel's Minister of Defence, has announced his retirement from politics. A map of China on new Chinese passports is controversial with its...

Human Rights Watch Report on Autonomous Weapons, and Matthew Waxman and Ken Anderson’s Critique

Human Rights Watch has released a new report (co-authored by the Harvard Law School Human Rights Clinic) on autonomous weapons systems that might emerge over the next several decades, titled "Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots."  The report calls for a multilateral treaty that would preemptively ban "development, production, and use" of fully autonomous weapons by all states.  It...

Sephardic Jews Get Right of Return – To Spain

Spain is now granting citizenship automatically without any residency requirement to those who can demonstrate descent from those Jews expelled from Spain more than 500 years ago. The rule could make as many as 3 million Sephardic Jews worldwide eligible for Spanish citizenship (600,000 of them in the United States, including a number who identify as Hispanic). The details remain...

Weekday News Wrap: Monday, November 26, 2012

The 18th session of the Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change kicks off today in Doha, Qatar, for a last ditch effort to negotiate new emission reductions before the current ones expire at the end of the year. The Guardian has an article about what to expect. The BBC has an article about Mahmoud Abbas'...

Weekend Roundup: November 17 – 24, 2012

Posting was light this week due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the US. We hope all our US readers had a very happy Thanksgiving holiday! Peter Spiro commented on the territorialist approach in Obama's speech on citizenship during this week's visit to Burma. Deborah Pearlstein posted about the ABA's recent journalists' guide on national security law, to which she contributed a chapter...

UN Proposes to Use Surveillance Drones in DR Congo-Rwanda Conflict

Pushback against weaponized drones and targeted killing, at least as undertaken by the United States, is increasing now that President Obama has been reelected, and presumably anti-drone campaigners are looking for ways to bring pressure on his administration's policies before they are set in strategic, operational, and logistical cement - as likely they would be after eight years under a Democratic administration. This NGO advocacy campaign has intense support among UN special rapporteurs - for counterterrorism and human rights, for example, and extrajudicial execution - as well as some, and perhaps considerable support among the US's European allies.  I've been meeting informally with various European government officials and diplomats who are trying to get a sense of the intersection of US government legal, policy, and strategic view. These European officials strike me as both circumspect and unhappy with the policy and legal rationales offered by the administration in its various speeches. The situation is complicated by the fact that the UN and our European allies - indeed, everyone with a defense budget to speak of - are acquiring drones (or at least seeking access to them, in the case of the UN), both surveillance drones and, at least in some cases, weaponized drones.  According to AFP, the UN is seeking surveillance drones to monitor the DR Congo-Rwanda conflict - the UN hopes that the United States or France, or perhaps other countries, will make them available:

UN officials stress that there could be no speedy deployment of drones in DR Congo as MONUSCO would need equipment and training. But it would be a major first in UN peacekeeping operations. A previous plan to get drones into DR Congo was dropped because of the cost, But the price of the technology has come down with so many countries now using unmanned planes for battlefield reconnaissance and espionage. "The UN has approached a number of countries, including the United States and France, about providing drones which could clearly play a valuable role monitoring the frontier," a UN diplomat said, on condition of anonymity." Clearly there will be political considerations though," the diplomat added. The UN plan is only to have surveillance drones, but the spying capability of the unmanned aerial vehicles worries a lot of countries.

France might be willing to do so, but it also has to consider other possible missions - such as a possible deployment of drones to support ECOWAS military action to oust Islamist insurgents who have seized territory in Mali.  But of course, these are all surveillance missions - not weaponized drones. Perhaps drone use by the UN or France or other NATO allies will remain purely as surveillance - but perhaps not.  In the hands of UN forces in DR Congo, maybe the drones will be surveillance UAVs only.  But France has not ruled out weaponized drones in Mali, so far as I know, if some intervention takes place, and I would be surprised (really surprised) if it did rule them out.  And there are good reasons to believe that if there were serious fighting by ground forces in Mali, the states supplying the troops fighting on the ground would demand that NATO countries supplying air assets use them in weaponized form to protect their ground troops.  (Greg McNeal also comments at his Forbes column.)