The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots was launched in 2013 and since then there have been increasing calls to ban the use of weapons that do not require human control to select and engage targets.

The new report includes responses from 97 countries to a survey on their position on the use of lethal autonomous weapons systems and the importance of meaningful human control over the use of force.

The report states in its key findings that the responding countries “expressed a wide array of serious ethical, legal, operational, proliferation, moral, and technological concerns over removing human control from the use of force”.

In 2019, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres tweeted: “Autonomous machines with the power and discretion to take lives without human involvement are politically unacceptable, morally repugnant and should be prohibited by international law.”

The Human Rights Watch report calls on states to introduce a “new international treaty to retain meaningful human control over the use of force and prohibit systems that lack such human control”.

It suggests that a Protocol could be added to the existing Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW). At the end of last year it was agreed that there would be CCW meetings held in 2020-21 to discuss these issues. However, these have been postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Mary Wareham, arms division advocacy director at Human Rights Watch and coordinator of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, said: “Removing human control from the use of force is now widely regarded as a grave threat to humanity that, like climate change, deserves urgent multilateral action.

“An international ban treaty is the only effective way to deal with the serious challenges raised by fully autonomous weapons.

“It’s abundantly clear that retaining meaningful human control over the use of force is an ethical imperative, a legal necessity, and a moral obligation.

“All countries need to respond with urgency by opening negotiations on a new international ban treaty.”