The United Nations rights chief voiced alarm Monday at reports of fully autonomous drones killing people in Ukraine, calling for an urgent ban on weapons that can kill without human involvement. Speaking before the UN Human Rights Council, Volker Turk said he was “horrified by reports that fully autonomous drones launched by the Russian Federation killed three Ukrainians last month”. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights also highlighted reports that Ukraine had “field-tested such weapons”. The New York Times reported last month that a Russian drone guided entirely by an artificial intelligence system killed three civilians in Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine on July 6. The report found that while the drone had been programmed by human operators to travel towards a particular petrol station, it had chosen its exact target, likely propane tanks, without human intervention. There has been growing pressure from international organisations and NGOs to regulate so-called lethal autonomous weapons, often referred to as “killer robots”. Last month, UN chief Antonio Guterres and Mirjana Spoljaric, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, issued a joint call to rein in such weapons, warning the world was “dangerously close to crossing a moral red line: the autonomous targeting of humans by machines”. “I join calls for the urgent prohibition of weapons that can take lives without human involvement,” Turk said Monday. After years of discussions, 128 countries agreed at the UN on Saturday on a definition of autonomous weapons, even as NGOs accused the United States and Russia especially of trying to weaken the agreed text. Countries are due to decide in November whether to launch full-on treaty negotiations on regulating autonomous weapons.
