Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems under IHL: Rethinking Human Control, Accountability, and Regulation

Abstract

Weapons that can select and engage targets without further human intervention unsettle a premise on which international humanitarian law (IHL) rests: that a human being makes, controls, and answers for each decision to use force. This article examines whether LAWS can comply with the principles of distinction, military necessity, proportionality, and humanity and with the requirements of accountability, and whether existing law suffices to govern them. Using doctrinal legal research with analytical and conceptual approaches, it analyzes Additional Protocol I, customary IHL, the Rome Statute, and the work of the Group of Governmental Experts under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. It argues that autonomy as such is not the decisive legal threshold. Under controlled conditions, autonomous functions can improve targeting precision, but in dynamic environments they strain the qualitative judgements that distinction and proportionality require and open a gap in individual criminal responsibility that superior responsibility cannot close. The article proposes a legally binding instrument that grades prohibitions and restrictions according to a system's degree of autonomy, predictability, and operational context, anchored in a requirement of meaningful human control.