Second Session of the Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, 2023 18th May 2023

Intervention on the revised draft

Mr. Chair

Thank you very much for sharing this new draft.

Even though many delegations in this room argued for strengthening of the text in order to ensure that centrality of human control is retained in AWS in order to ensure compliance with international law and IHL in particular, we are quite concerned that the text in several ways is now even further weakened to the extent that we run the risk of even previously agreed understandings are backtracked. Our concerns are mainly with paragraph 20 such as deletion of the word ‘anticipation. Which we believe is already an IHL requirement as well as concerns regarding para 21 in this regard.

Adoption of a substantive repot is important for our delegation as much as it is the same for other delegations but we believe that it should be progressive and forward looking in nature.