Last week, the 79th United Nations General Assembly First Committee on Disarmament and International Security came to a close in New York, after four weeks of discussions on disarmament-related issues. Autonomous weapons systems were a particular point of focus at this year’s First Committee.
There were more national statements on autonomous weapons this year than in any previous First Committee, with 120 national statements from 80 states in a national capacity, and 131 statements including statements from groups (i.e. the African Group, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Caribbean Community, and the Non-Aligned Movement) and statements from the European Union, the ICRC, the UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, and the Chair of the Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. The growing attention given to the topic of autonomous weapons included many national statements emphasising the demonstrably urgent need for their prohibition and regulation, and calling for the negotiation of new, legally binding rules on autonomous weapons as soon as possible. This is a significant increase in statements in a national capacity from previous years, demonstrating the continuing growth in international attention on autonomous weapons – our monitoring in 2023 tracked 64 states (25% increase), and in 2022 tracked 54 states (48% increase).
On the 5th November, the First Committee adopted a resolution on autonomous weapons systems for the second year running, mindful of the “serious challenges and concerns that new and emerging technological applications in the military domain, including those related to artificial intelligence and autonomy in weapons systems, [raise] from humanitarian, legal, security, technological and ethical perspectives.”
161 states voted in favour of draft resolution L.77, titled “lethal autonomous weapons systems,” with three voting against the resolution, and 13 abstentions. This was the second resolution on autonomous weapons to be tabled at the First Committee, following last year’s UNGA Resolution 78/241, which paved the way for the UN Secretary-General’s recent report on autonomous weapon systems. Draft resolution L.77 was tabled by Austria and supported by a cross-regional group of 26 co-sponsoring states, including Antigua and Barbuda, Belgium, Brazil, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Ireland, Kiribati, Liechtenstein, Malawi, Malta, Mexico, Aotearoa New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Republic of Moldova, San Marino, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, State of Palestine, Switzerland, and Trinidad and Tobago. For a region-specific breakdown of voting, see our AWS at First Committee overview here.
As adopted, this year’s resolution is a modest approach that builds on the 2023 resolution 78/241 and the joint statement on autonomous weapons delivered by 70 states in 2022. The main sponsors of the resolution clearly took lengths to draft the resolution as complementary and supportive of the current mandate of the CCW Group of Governmental Experts on lethal autonomous weapons systems (GGE LAWS). The resolution results in the convening of open informal consultations in 2025 over two days in New York “to consider the report of the Secretary-General in full complementarity with and in a manner that supports the fulfilment of the mandate of the Group of Governmental Experts in order to further the international community’s understanding of the issues involved by discussing the full range of views received, including proposals and relevant aspects raised in the report that may thus far not have been discussed in detail in the Group of Governmental Experts.”
The consultations will be open to the participation of all UN member states and observer states, international and regional organisations, the ICRC, and civil society, including the scientific community and industry. These talks in 2025 will support capacity building on the topic, and give an opportunity to examine issues that aren’t the main focus of current talks within the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW)—such as ethics and human rights—which states can and must use to build strong foundations for treaty negotiations that respond comprehensively to the problem of autonomous weapons.
Unfortunately, the ambition of this year’s resolution was successfully curtailed by a small number of highly militarised states, which demanded changes to the resolution to significantly reduce the scope of the resolution. This demonstrates why it is so critical that autonomous weapon systems are discussed in a forum that is accessible to all states and in which consensus rules cannot be used a veto, as has frequently occurred at the CCW Group of Governmental Experts on LAWS (CCW GGE on LAWS).
CCW states are currently meeting in Geneva for the Convention’s meeting of High Contracting Parties – but the sessions have been in informal mode every day this week, with the live broadcast of discussions removed from UN WebTV, due to a failure to agree on the Rules of Procedure for the meeting. As a result, statements delivered by states in informal mode are essentially ‘off-the-record’. This casts doubt on numerous states’ descriptions of the CCW in their First Committee statements as the most ‘transparent’, ‘appropriate’ and ‘effective’ forum for discussion on autonomous weapons.
More in-depth detail on each week’s First Committee discussions on autonomous weapons can be found in our ‘Autonomous Weapons System’ entries in Reaching Critical Will’s First Committee Monitor.
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