New technologies, the conduct of hostilities and respect for international humanitarian law

The Geneva Press Club and the International Committee of the Red Cross invite you to a lunch talk with :

• Laurent Gisel, Director of the Weapons and Conduct of Hostilities Unit, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
• Anna Rosalie Greipl, PhD Candidate in International Law, IHEID, Researcher, Geneva Academy

Moderated by Isabelle Falconnier, Director of the Geneva Press Club, and Luisa Ballin, UN-accredited journalist.

To participate, please use the following links :

The major military powers are openly banking on autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence to gain a decisive military advantage on the battlefield. The development and use of such weapons, as well as the growing use of algorithms to help identify and destroy potential targets, raise increasingly pressing legal, moral and ethical questions. Ultimately, can humanity accept that an algorithm – an automated process – can determine who will live or die? Can human life be reduced to data collected by sensors and automated calculations?

In the absence of new legal limits, autonomous weapons could operate with little restraint, making life-or-death decisions without human oversight. Unreliable understanding of an environment as complex as a battlefield would lead to obvious errors in target identification and considerable civilian casualties. The essential principles of the conduct of hostilities (distinction, precaution and proportionality), which guarantee the protection of civilians and combatants alike, could be seriously undermined. On this 75th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions, international humanitarian law, when respected, remains the best bulwark against the excesses promised by the unrestrained use of new technologies in warfare.

For discussion:
Laurent Gisel
Head of the Weapons and Conduct of Hostilities Unit at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Laurent Gisel leads the development and promotion of the ICRC’s legal and policy positions on weapons systems, new technologies of warfare and the conduct of hostilities. He is also an expert on issues relating to warfare in urban environments, cyberspace and outer space.

Anna Rosalie Greipl
Research assistant at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, she works on Disruptive Military Technologies projects. She is also a doctoral researcher at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. Her doctoral research focuses on the military use of artificial intelligence and its impact on international humanitarian law.