Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « UN. Commission on Human Rights. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions »

UN human rights mechanisms continue to proliferate, producing numerous decisions and voluminous reports. This article reviews the ways in which such mechanisms apply international humanitarian law, including the law of Geneva and the law of The Hague. In doing so, it focuses mainly on the practice of the rapporteurs appointed by the UN Commission on Human Rights to investigate the human rights situations in specific countries and on that of the thematic rapporteurs and working groups which the Commission has entrusted with monitoring specific types of serious human rights violations wherever they occur, in particular the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions and the Representative of the Secretary-General on Internally Displaced Persons, whose mandates most often lead them to examine abuses occurring in the context of armed conflicts. Reference is also made to two innovative mechanisms which functioned in El Salvador: the first UN-sponsored “truth commission” and the first human rights monitoring body established as part of a comprehensive mechanism for monitoring compliance with a UN-sponsored peace agreement. Certain observations made by treaty monitoring bodies are also mentioned.

In March 1982, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights initiated the appointment of a Special Rapporteur on Summary or Arbitrary Executions. The Special Rapporteur on Summary or Arbitrary Executions has done far more than merely study that grave human rights problem; he has received complaints about impending and past executions, issued appeals to governments about threatened executions and the need to investigate past killings, and reported publicly on much of his activity. The Commission on Human Rights not only has renewed the Special Rapporteur on Summary or Arbitrary Executions in its subsequent annual sessions, but has followed this precedent by appointing in 1985 a similar Special Rapporteur on Torture and in 1986 a Special Rapporteur on Intolerance and Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief.

Abstract Autonomous weapons systems have been the subject of heated debate since 2010, when Philip Alston, then Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, brought the issue to the international spotlight in his interim report to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly 65th Session. Alston affirmed that “automated technologies are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and artificial intelligence reasoning and decision-making abilities are actively being researched and receive significant funding. States’ militaries and defence industry developers are working to develop ‘fully autonomous capability’, such that technological advances in artificial intelligence will enable unmanned aerial vehicles to make and execute complex decisions, including the identification of human targets and the ability to kill them.”1 Later, in 2013, Christof Heyns, who was Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions at the time, published a report that elaborated further on the issues raised by what he called “lethal autonomous robotics”.2 Following a recommendation by Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters at the UN General Assembly 68th Session, the Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects, as amended on 21 December 2021, started discussing autonomous weapons systems in 2014. Then, the Group of Governmental Experts on Emerging Technologies in the Area of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (GGE on LAWS)3 was created in 2016 to focus on this issue.4 While the group has kept meeting since then, no clear steps have been taken yet towards a normative framework on autonomous weapons as of September 2022. In all these years, persons with disabilities – including conflict survivors – have not been included in discussions, nor has the disability perspective been reflected in international debate on autonomous weapons. Only recently has there been any effort to consider the rights of persons with disabilities when examining ethical questions related to artificial intelligence (AI). In this article, we will examine how and why autonomous weapons have a disproportionate impact on persons with disabilities, because of the discrimination that results from a combination of factors such as bias in AI, bias in the military and the police, barriers to justice and humanitarian assistance in situations of armed conflict, and the lack of consultation and participation of persons with disabilities and their representative organizations on issues related to autonomy in weapons systems.

This chapter explores ethical challenges potentially arising from AI-controlled drones, focusing on how their use might be restrained through international legal regulation. The starting point is the 2013 recommendation of a moratorium on the production of lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) to the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council by its Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. The response by UN member states to this recommendation was to resolve that relevant discussions should occur within the framework of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). However, the critical problem identified in this chapter is that the introduction of CCW-based regulation requires consensus among all the treaty’s members. Thus, to achieve principled and legally-binding restraints on the use of autonomous armed drones, scholars and policy practitioners need to confront a set of challenges to multilateral consensus. These challenges include: threats to multilateralism in arms-control generally; ongoing concerns about a military AI arms race; anti-activist sentiments and ‘banphobia’ among arms-control diplomats; and differing international understandings of what moral values are applicable to the deployment of autonomous weapons systems.