Challenges Of The Autonomous Armed Drones To International Humanitarian Law And Solutions

One of the most important aspects of the International Humanitarian Law(IHL) is the restriction on the weapons. In recent years, with the rapid development of science and technology, new weapons become a new hot issue of IHL as the present legal structures and principles are challenged frequently by them. One of the most vivid examples is the armed drones in armed conflicts. Since the appearance of armed drones in modern warfare, whether such deployment of armed drones in armed conflicts is in compliance with the IHL has always been a controversial topic. However, a consensus has been reached that though the drones has potential threats to the IHL, it is still under the control of an operator(human being). In addition, the armed drones in its essence, is just a platform for weapons rather than a prohibited weapon.The armed drones mentioned above is still under the control of man despite the fact that there is no pilot. However, a new type of armed drones has been emerged in the plan for the new weapon research and development agenda. Once launched, such drones are completely autonomous. They set the course of their flight to reach the location of their targets, identify the objects to be targeted and the aerial defence installations protecting these if any, as well as the other objects likely to be damaged or destroyed by the attack. If damage to non-military objects is deemed to be excessive(following algorithms in their software), the drones were programmed to cancel their attack and return to their base. It is easy to predict that once such highly autonomous armed drones are deployed in armed conflicts, great challenges will be brought to the present IHL rules and principles. However, the huge potential threats has not attracted enough attention of global society. There are few discussions or researches on such topic and even the rare ones haven’t focused on legal analysis. Especially, when dealing with the punishment of the war crimes committed with the help of highly autonomous armed drones, no enough consideration of the current statutory laws or cases are given.It is even more disturbing that highly autonomous armed drones is not a specific issue but an example of the weapons under the control of highly autonomous weapon system, which is in constant research and development of the military science labs all over the the globe. The weapons under the control of such system have various kinds of forms, but the same kinds of challenges to the IHL principles and rules are shared.The article has three chapters to discuss the challenges to IHL rules and principles brought by the highly autonomous armed drones and the solutions. In Chapter I, the author first discusses the recent development of the armed drones and its future trends. In this chapter, the author also discusses the IHL Principles of Proportionality and Distinction. By combining the opinions of the international criminal courts and comparing the highly autonomous armed drones with the traditional ones, the author discusses whether the highly autonomous armed drones should be prohibited by IHL or not.In Chapter II, the author holds the view that regardless of the fact that the highly autonomous armed drones should be prohibited by IHL, the sky-rocketing development of science and technology in such field is unstoppable and considering the military advantages that would be brought by the armed drones, the deployment of the drones is almost inevitable. IHL is built by multilateral agreements and common willingness and the countries all have there own national interests regarding the drones issue. In addition, The type of drones discussed in this article has never been deployed in real armed conflict, which makes the consequences unpredictable in practice. Considering the above reasons, it is unlikely that countries could reach a consensus on whether to prohibit the use of highly autonomous armed drones or not. Consequently, it is important to discuss the loopholes in current legal system and fix them timely.In this Chapter, the author discusses the dilemma in punishing the war crimes committed with the deployment of highly autonomous armed drone. For this purpose, the specific articles of perpetrators and commanders’ criminal responsibility in Rome Statute and The Element of Crimes are analyzed.In Chapter III, the author contemplates the solutions to the problems mentioned in above chapters and analyze the practicability for the solutions,...