Publication

This paper focuses on the legal challenges posed by autonomous weapon systems or those with increasingly automated features. More specifically, the paper’s author provides a brief introduction to Article 36 of Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which requires states to conduct legal reviews of all new weapons, means and methods of warfare in order to determine whether their use is prohibited by international law. The author then discusses the difficulties of reviewing weapons that contain automated or autonomous features and highlights the best practices that reviewers could use, including those that reduce the costs of testing and evaluating different systems or their parts.