Reports & briefings

‘Por una Prohibición de las Armas Autónomas: Argumentos para un Tratado Vinculante’ (2025)

| Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

| Cátedra Manuel Ballbe

| Centre Delas d’estudis per la Pau

This 2025 report presents updated arguments for a legally binding international treaty to prohibit autonomous weapons systems (LAWs). It examines how military AI technologies deepen global inequalities, erode human dignity, and undermine legal accountability by delegating life-and-death decisions to opaque [...]

‘A Hazard to Human Rights: Autonomous Weapons Systems and Digital Decision-Making’ (2025)

| Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC)

| Human Rights Watch

Autonomous weapons systems present numerous risks to humanity, most of which infringe on fundamental obligations and principles of international human rights law. Such systems select and engage targets based on sensor processing rather than human inputs. The threats they pose [...]

Advocating for A Legally Binding Instrument on Autonomous Weapons Systems: Which Way Ahead (2024)

| Automated Decision Research

In the e-journal Ethics and Armed Forces, Automated Decision Research manager Dr Catherine Connolly writes on the increasing global support in efforts to negotiate a new legally binding instrument on autonomous weapons systems. For the full issue of the journal, [...]

Overview of submissions to the UN Secretary-General’s report on autonomous weapons systems (2024)

| Automated Decision Research

This report contains short summaries of submissions to the United Nations Secretary-General's report on autonomous weapons systems, pursuant to UNGA Resolution 78/241. Please note that this is a reference document, and that these short submission summaries cannot and do not [...]

Targeting people and digital dehumanisation: recent stakeholder contributions (2024)

| Automated Decision Research

This update to our 2023 briefing paper, 'Targeting people and digital dehumanisation', highlights the growing international concern around the targeting of people by autonomous weapons, and features recent stakeholder contributions on the issue.

Autonomous weapons and the ‘lethal’ qualifier (2024)

| Automated Decision Research

This short briefing paper on the use of the 'lethal' qualifier in describing autonomous weapons explains why use of the word 'lethal' is superfluous, and hinders discussions on important aspects of IHL and human rights that should be taken into [...]

Convergences in state positions on human control (2023)

| Automated Decision Research

This paper presents an examination of convergences in state positions on human control in the context of autonomy in weapons systems. Despite differences in phrasing when discussing the human element as it relates to autonomous weapons systems, there is much [...]

Targeting people and digital dehumanisation (2023)

| Automated Decision Research

This short briefing paper addresses the need for a prohibition on autonomous weapons systems designed or used to target humans, and the digital dehumanisation inherent in such systems.

Autonomous weapons and digital dehumanisation (2022)

| Automated Decision Research

This short explainer paper discusses autonomous weapons in the context of digital dehumanisation.

Completely outside human control? (2023)

| Article 36

This discussion paper provides commentary on the proposed prohibition in the Working Paper submitted by Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden to the 2022 GGE on LAWS, July 2022. The paper notes that 'The notion of a [...]