After all, neither “lethality” nor “autonomy” are decisive factors in the debate. It should be noted up front that the term LAWS itself is problematic.

Meanwhile, the international Campaign to Stop Killer Robots (Killer Robots Campaign, KRC) is criticizing CCW diplomacy as “moving forward at a snail's pace”, with low ambitions and negligible outcomes despite widespread public opposition to LAWS and some thirty countries (twenty-six of which are CCW States Parties) calling for the immediate negotiation of a new, binding legal instrument rather than continuing talks on frameworks and principles, which the KRC tends to consider vague and redundant respectively. While some States – most prominently Russia – have displayed no interest in producing new international law in the CCW, arguing that “concerns regarding LAWS can be addressed through faithful implementation of the existing international legal norms”, 4 others – such as Germany – claim that nothing short of “an important milestone” has already been reached with the 2019 report cited above, even describing the adopted eleven guiding principles as a “politically binding regulation”. 3 After the first five-day meeting of 2020 was postponed and then conducted in a hybrid format due to the current global COVID-19 pandemic, the second meeting had to be shelved, and it is currently unclear when and how the talks can resume. 2 In addition, in Annex III of their 2019 report, States Parties adopted eleven guiding principles to take into account going forward. For ten days in 2020 and for an as-yet unknown number of days in 2021 (when the CCW's next Review Conference is due), the GGE was and is tasked with debating and fleshing out “aspects of the normative and operational framework” on LAWS. For the first time, however, these talks, which had previously been conducted between 20 in informal meetings and since 2017 within the framework of an expert subsidiary body called a Group of Governmental Experts (GGE), were mandated to produce a specific outcome. In November 2019, CCW States Parties decided to, once again, continue their deliberations on LAWS. 1 In CCW parlance, the weapon autonomy issue is called “emerging technologies in the area of lethal autonomous weapons systems” (LAWS). The CCW's purpose “is to ban or restrict the use of specific types of weapons that are considered to cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants or to affect civilians indiscriminately”. The United Nations (UN) Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) is the epicentre of the global debate on autonomy in weapons systems. To this end, it offers some thoughts on how the implementation of regulation can be expedited. The article argues that regulation is nevertheless imperative, because the strategic as well as ethical risks outweigh the military benefits of unshackled weapon autonomy. It is difficult because it requires new diplomatic language, and because the military value of weapon autonomy is hard to forego in the current arms control winter. This article explains why regulating autonomy in weapons systems, entailing the codification of a legally binding obligation to retain meaningful human control over the use of force, is such a challenging task within the framework of the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.

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