Turkey

Turkey has participated in all Convention on Certain Conventional Weapon (CCW) meetings on autonomous weapons systems. Turkey has not yet declared its position on the negotiation of a legally binding instrument on autonomous weapons. At the77th UN General Assembly First Committee meeting in October 2022, Turkey stated that it believes ‘that the development and use of autonomous weapons systems which does not have meaningful human control are undesirable and conflict with the IHL. Humans (commanders and operators) have to be involved in the decision loop and bear the ultimate responsibility when dealing with the decision of life and death.'^[1]Statement by Turkey, 77th UN General Assembly First Committee, 21 October 2022, https://reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/1com/1com22/statements/21Oct_Turkiye.pdf

In a statement delivered at the 2021 CCW Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (GGE on LAWS), Turkey said that it ‘believes that the development and use of fully autonomous weapons systems which do not have meaningful human control are undesirable and in conflict with International Humanitarian Law.’^[2]Statement by Turkey, CCW Group of Governmental Experts on LAWS, 04 August 2021, http://149.202.215.129:8080/s2t/UNOG/LAWS-04-08-2021-PM_mp3_en.html; please note that this link leads to the full … Continue reading

Turkey is involved in the development of weapons systems with autonomous functions.^[3]See, for example, Pax (2019), Slippery Slope: The arms industry and increasingly autonomous weapons, https://paxforpeace.nl/media/download/pax-report-slippery-slope.pdf