CYIL vol. 9 (2018)

LUDMILA HALAJOVÁ CYIL 9 ȍ2018Ȏ hazardous activities. In both military and environmental area the scientific uncertainty about technological development makes it difficult to ascertain ex ante whether certain technology will violate existing legal norms. The state responsibility for AWS could therefore stem from the obligation of due diligence, i.e. the obligation to effectively manage the risks that can cause severe harm to others. The obligation of due diligence and other related international environmental law principles, such as obligations of risk assessment, information sharing, monitoring and technological standard setting, should be considered as a starting point for the future regulation of AWS. Eliav Lieblich and Eyal Benvenisti , on the other hand, look at the problem through the optics of administrative law, which according to their view helps to understand the existing objections to AWS and could be used as a complementing (or at least interpretative) source to the relevant principles of IHL. The greatest utility of administrative law for the current debate is that it puts emphasis on the proper process of decision making rather than simply on the outcome of the decision. Lieblich and Benvenisti view war as a form of governance, where the battlefield decisions can be analysed as executive actions, to which some basic administrative law principles could be applied. In particular, the authors propose that the states have a continuing duty to exercise discretion in decision making, particularly when taking actions that produce risk to civilians, and to take into account the interests of the affected individuals. In this line of the reasoning the deployment of AWS runs counter to the obligation to exercise discretion because it lacks respect for the individual and therefore the necessary decision-making quality. That is because the executive decision in relation to AWS is taken in advance as the individual at risk is not considered in real time but rather factored into a pre-programmed process. The focus on process rather than on the outcome concurs with the opinion of Pablo Kalmanovitz . In his contribution he observes that it is virtually impossible to make a sufficiently specific analysis of the potential impact of AWS since at this stage of technological development we can only guess what their specific capabilities will be. It is therefore more useful to base the critique of AWS on the nature of the decision to use force and its compatibility with the norms of IHL than on the potential consequences of the AWS deployment. In the conclusive remarks the editors bring together the ideas and arguments presented in the volume by various actors. They also give two main suggestions on how to move forward in the international debate. First, they propose to increase the level of transparency by sharing the information among states and they encourage them to eventually develop and agree on common standards and good practice in conducting the reviews of new weapons. Second, they propose to focus on the notion of “meaningful human control” and to identify the levels of control a human has to retain over the critical functions of AWS in various scenarios in order for the use of AWS to be lawful under international law. As I stated previously, the contributions focus on the three selected topics, i.e. autonomy, human dignity and accountability. Although the authors mention other relevant issues, including the potential capacity of AWS to abide by the relevant IHL rules on the means and methods of combat, these are not discussed in great detail. That is because they are covered by quite a number of other academic writings, which are often referred to in the texts. Therefore, the collection is not suitable as an introductory text to the phenomenon of AWS or as a summary covering all the relevant angles. But, in my opinion, the slightly selective approach to the topic is not a weakness of the collection but rather its strength. At

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