By Hamid Khan Wazir
ISLAMABAD: A sizeable number of 61% of the public are in favor of banning fully autonomous weapons; however, unfortunately, the developing countries are always in the race of acquiring such lethal weapons to establish their weaponry superiority.
More than 4,500 tech workers and 21 Nobel Peace laureates are calling for a ban while 30 countries are now calling to ban Lethal Autonomous Weapons System (LAWS) through a legally binding treaty.
The European Parliament adopted its first resolution calling for a ban on fully autonomous weapons.
Speakers at a Seminar titled “Stop the Future Pandemic of Killer Robots” stressed the need for imposing a ban on fully autonomous weapons that lack the human judgment necessary to evaluate the proportionality of an attack, distinguish civilian from a combatant, and abide by other core principles of the laws of war.
They were of the view that the autonomous weapons would decide who lives and dies, without further human intervention, which crosses a moral threshold. As machines, they would lack the inherently human characteristics such as compassion that are necessary to make complex ethical choices.
Speaking on the occasion, Raza Shah Khan, Chief Executive Sustainable Peace & Development Organization (SPADO) said that Killer Robots are fully autonomous weapons that operated without human intervention.
He said that India is trying its level best to acquire the killer weapons.
Usman Iqbal Jadoon, Director, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ex. Counselor, Pakistan Mission to the UN in Geneva said that fully autonomous weapons would cause destruction for the world.
However, he said that unfortunately, the developed world is in the race to acquire lethal weapons. He said that Pakistan always raised voice against making such lethal weapons that endangered human lives.
In May 2013, Pakistan became the first nation to call for LAWS to be prohibited and it has repeatedly urged the creation of a new international ban instrument. Pakistan has expressed multiple concerns with these weapons, finding that they will violate international humanitarian and human rights law as well as lower the threshold for going to war.
However, unfortunately, Indians always worked for the promotion of such deadly weapons, adding that all such films that project such weapons are sorrowful, Usman added.
He said that our new generation will forget humanity and mortality by watching such movies and weapons.
Brigadier (retd) Azam Efendi, Security Analyst; Dr. Asma Khawaja, Associate Professor, National Defence, University and Author of Shaking Hands with Clenched Fits; Dr. Qibla Ayaz, Chairman, Council of Islamic Ideology Government of Pakistan and Ahmer Bilal Soofi, Founding President, Research Society of International Law (TBC) spoke on the occasion.
They said that replacing troops with machines could make the decision to go to war easier and shift the burden of conflict even further on to civilians. Islamic Ideology Council adopted a strong stance on violence against children; however, unfortunately, the world failed to play a proactive role to ban the making of such deadly weapons.
They demanded that religious scholars of different religions should come forward and raise their voice against such deadly weapons.
Killer robots, cluster bombs, and drones are out of human control. These are weapons through which wars couldn’t be won but the opponents could be eradicated from the surface of the earth.
The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is a global coalition of more than 150 non-governmental organizations from 60 countries working to retain meaningful human control over the use of force by banning the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons, known in the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) as lethal autonomous weapons systems.
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