Advancing human rights while training the next generation of advocates

The Stop Killer Robots campaign’s recent global meeting in San José, Costa Rica, highlighted the campaign’s vision for a new international legal instrument on autonomous weapons systems, what it will take to get there, and how the campaign has progressed to reach this point. The Digital Dehumanization Conference, the campaign’s first global meeting since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, convened campaigners from around the world from February 20-22.

On February 28, 2023, the International Human Rights Clinic hosted a panel discussion on the impact of and emergency response to the recent earthquakes in northwest Syria. For more than a decade, armed conflict has devastated the civilian populations in the region. The February earthquakes have exacerbated the situation, retraumatizing and displacing some of Syria’s most vulnerable communities. Despite the…

This article was first published on Just Security. The push to prohibit and regulate autonomous weapons systems made significant progress last month when nearly every country in Latin America and the Caribbean endorsed a new communiqué calling for the “urgent negotiation” of a binding international treaty.

A new United States Department of Defense directive concerning development of autonomous weapons systems is an inadequate response to the threats posed by removing human control from the use of force, the International Human Rights Clinic and Human Rights Watch said in a report issued this week. Instead of creating adequate controls on the development of these weapons, the directive…