St Vincent and the Grenadines

In December 2023, St Vincent and the Grenadines voted in support of UN General Assembly Resolution 78/241 on lethal autonomous weapons systems. Resolution 78/241 stressed the ‘urgent need for the international community to address the challenges and concerns raised by autonomous weapons systems’, and mandated the UN Secretary-General to prepare a report, reflecting the views of member and observer states on autonomous weapons systems and ways to address the related challenges and concerns they raise from humanitarian, legal, security, technological and ethical perspectives and on the role of humans in the use of force.

St Vincent and the Grenadines is a state party to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). St Vincent and the Grenadines supports the negotiation of a legally binding instrument on autonomous weapons systems.

At the 2023 CARICOM conference on the human impacts of autonomous weapons, St Vincent and the Grenadines signed the CARICOM Declaration on Autonomous Weapons Systems, stating its commitment to ‘support the indispensability of meaningful human control over the use of force and thereby encourage the pursuit of an international legally binding instrument which incorporates prohibitions and regulations on AWS’, and to ‘collaborate on endeavours aimed at negotiating an international legally binding instrument that prohibits unpredictable or uncontrollable AWS capable of using force without meaningful human control, and prohibit those designed or employed to apply force against persons, while implementing regulations for other forms of AWS’.^[1]CARICOM Declaration on Autonomous Weapons Systems, https://www.caricom-aws2023.com/_files/ugd/b69acc_c1ffb97ed9024930a3205ae4e34c1b45.pdf