Advancing the Legal Review of Autonomous Weapon Systems: Report of an Expert Meeting (Sydney, 16–18 April 2024) by Renato Wolf, Lauren Sanders, Rain Liivoja, Natalia Jevglevskaja and Netta Goussac states
This Report provides a summary of an expert meeting on the legal review of autonomous weapons systems (‘AWS’), which was convened by the Directorate of Operations and International Law, Australian Defence Force, in Sydney in April 2024 (‘Expert Meeting’), and chaired by Colonel Damian Copeland. This Meeting was the second such meeting, building upon the inaugural Expert Meeting (‘First Meeting’) which took place in Sydney in March 2023. The Expert Meeting was attended by governmental and non-governmental experts from eight States (Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States). Since the First Meeting, the discussion about the utility of the conduct of legal reviews has intensified in multilateral fora, most notably within the Group of Governmental Experts on Emerging Technologies in the Area of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (‘GGE’), mandated by the High Contracting Parties (‘HCPs’) to the Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects (‘CCW’). This enhanced focus has been reflected in academic discourse, and is in part a result of operationalisation by those States that have adopted military technologies that incorporate autonomy. This Meeting provided an opportunity to review the progress of international discourse about the regulation of AWS generally, as well as how legal reviews have featured in that debate. A summary of this update is included in Part 2 of this report.
This focus of the current international debate aligns with the general rationale for this Expert Meeting. Legal reviews of AWS are a method to assess a State’s ability to comply with and implement international law but they can also function as a confidence building measure when States share information about the conduct and process of legal reviews. Accordingly, a stated aim of this Meeting was to enhance State cooperation through the sharing of practices as they relate to the legal review of AWS. This was achieved on the first day of the Meeting, by governmental experts providing updates and further information about their national practices as they pertain to the conduct of legal reviews, and the review of AWS and, autonomous or AI-enabled capabilities more generally (referred to as ‘military AI, or ‘MAI’ hereafter). A summary of these practices is included in Part 3 of this report.
Separate to enhancing State information sharing in undertaking legal reviews of AWS, this Meeting undertook to again reflect upon the specific practices related to the conduct of legal reviews that may require adjustment to account for the challenges presented by AWS, and the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomy into military capabilities, more generally. A number of themes emerged from this discussion. They are:
• legal reviews in the context of other processes; • lexicon with definitions of key terms; • legal reviews of weapons / means and legal review of methods; • legal review as a process compared to legal reviews as an outcome; • multi-disciplinary approach to legal reviews; • security of AWS; • the role of industry in the legal review of AWS; and • information-sharing and transparency in the legal review of AWS.
These themes are addressed in Part 4 of the Report.
In spite of this invigorated focus on legal reviews, the practice of legal reviews by States, either in satisfaction of their legal obligation under article 36 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions (‘AP I’), or as a matter of policy, remains far from universal. In addition to the confidence building function undertaken in relation to the sharing of State-specific practices, the second iteration of this meeting has worked to consolidate an international community of practice of like-minded States (and their representatives), and practitioners from industry and academia, who are building the corpus of knowledge about the methods by which the challenges presented by AWS in conducting a sufficiently robust legal reviews, can be overcome. This community of practice has also contributed to discussion and understanding of Elements of Good Practice in the review of AWS, which is addressed separately to this report (see Part 5, regarding next steps).
