The United Kingdom, along with other states, is committed to reviewing ex ante the lawfulness of any weapons, means, or methods of warfare that it develops and deploys. Despite a rather sparse body of literature, and even sparser publicly available information about practice, the concept of legal review has come to play an almost totemic role in reassuring concerned publics about states' commitment to developing and using AI-enabled weapons and means of warfare "responsibly" and "safely."

However, the conceptual challenges of legal review are more profound than many operational military lawyers may appreciate. While an iterative approach to legal review throughout the lifecycle of AI-enabled capabilities is rightly understood as a necessary condition for shaping and ensuring their lawful use under International Humanitarian Law (IHL), this broad conclusion leaves uncertainty about what such review must concretely look like and what factors it must take into account for it to also be a sufficient condition. The House of Lords Committee on AI in Weapon Systems has concluded that the government "must demonstrate that it has an effective system to perform Article 36 weapons reviews for AI-enabled autonomous weapon systems (AWS), particularly those which continue to learn and modify their behaviour after deployment, including setting thresholds for triggering a new review."

In this presentation, Professor Nehal Bhuta will examine some of the key challenges to effective legal review and highlight possible ways forward.

Note: This event is open to the public and free to attend live online (via Microsoft Teams).

Speaker: Professor Nehal Bhuta
Nehal Bhuta holds the Chair of Public International Law at the University of Edinburgh and is Co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law. He previously held the Chair of Public International Law at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, where he was also Co-Director of the Institute's Academy of European Law. He serves on the editorial boards of the European Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, Constellations, and is a founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Humanity. He is also a series editor for the Oxford University Press series The History and Theory of International Law.

Prior to his tenure at the EUI, Nehal was on the faculty at the New School for Social Research and at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. Before entering academia, he worked with Human Rights Watch and the International Center for Transitional Justice. His two most recent edited volumes are Freedom of Religion, Secularism, and Human Rights (OUP) and Autonomous Weapons Systems - Law, Ethics, Policy (Cambridge University Press, with Beck, Geiss, Liu, and Kress). Nehal’s research spans a wide range of doctrinal, historical, and theoretical issues in international law, international humanitarian law, international criminal law, and human rights law.

 

Chair: Dr Maria Varaki
Dr Maria Varaki is a Lecturer in International Law in the War Studies Department at King's College London. Before moving to London, she held research positions at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights in Helsinki and at the Law Faculty of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She was also an Assistant Professor of International Law at Kadir Has University in Istanbul.

Maria holds a PhD in International Law from the Irish Centre for Human Rights in Galway, Ireland, and two LLM degrees in International and Comparative Law from Tulane University and New York University School of Law. She is currently a Research Associate on the Three Generations of Digital Human Rights ERC project (2023-2028) at Hebrew University’s Faculty of Law.