Human Rights Watch report: autonomous weapons threaten human rights in war and peacetime, treaty needed

Human Rights Watch released a 61-page report on 28 April 2025, produced jointly with the Harvard Law School clinic on international human rights, on autonomous weapons systems and digital decision-making. The organization says the weapons pose grave risks to human rights in war and in peacetime, and it urges governments to negotiate a multinational treaty. The report came out ahead of the first UN General Assembly meeting on autonomous weapons, scheduled for 12 and 13 May 2025 in New York.

The report examines weapons that choose and attack targets using sensor data rather than human input. It finds that they would breach the rights to remedy, privacy, life and peaceful assembly, and conflict with human dignity and non-discrimination principles. Lead author Bonnie Docherty says use would extend beyond war to law enforcement and border control. The report argues that such systems cannot interpret complex situations or value human life, that those that rely on AI would likely be discriminatory, and that mass surveillance used to develop them would harm privacy while the opacity of the systems leaves victims without a remedy.

Human Rights Watch notes that more than 120 countries have called for a new treaty. It says the UN Secretary-General and the Red Cross committee's president have urged a legally binding instrument by 2026. It adds that talks under the Convention on Conventional Weapons have produced no substantive outcome since 2014, because consensus decision-making lets a single state block proposals, and it calls for negotiations in a forum with voting-based decisions and clear deadlines.