AT three o’clock on the morning of Saturday, Sept 5, 2026, Room III of the Palais des Nations in Geneva — the only room in the building with any sign of life — erupted in applause. The Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS), under the able leadership of its Dutch chair, had adopted — after three years of negotiations — a report containing elements of an instrument. On the final day, the delegations of the 128 high contracting parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) sat for 18 hours without a break.

The report contains, for the first time, an agreed characterisation of LAWS. The subject has been under discussion in the CCW since 2014, and only now have states parties been able to say which systems fall under the label. The report also reaffirms that control and human judgement are needed to ensure compliance with international humanitarian law (IHL), that human beings must determine the measures necessary for that compliance. It sets out a non-exhaustive list of what those measures might be.

Part of the applause that morning was relief, and part of the relief was that the text had survived at all. Over three years, a small number of militarily significant states, the very states developing and fielding these technologies, worked steadily to thin it out. ‘Human control’ became ‘judgement and control’, and then control that could be exercised indirectly. Predictability, reliability, and........

© Dawn