Crimes without Humanity?

The development of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) and, more generally, the role of artificial intelligence in warfare, may come to pose unprecedented challenges to criminal law, including by making it harder to link harm to individuals who can be held responsible, due to the pivotal role of the concepts of actus reus, mens rea and causation in that domain. In this context, the notion of meaningful human control has been proposed to address some of the challenges of ensuring accountability for serious violations of international humanitarian law. One possibility might be to link — conceptually, or even legally — meaningful human control with the ‘control theory’ propounded at the International Criminal Court to assign criminal responsibility. Under this theory, the ascription of criminal responsibility to an individual as a direct perpetrator requires an assessment of whether they enjoy an effective ability to decide on the commission of a crime. This article elaborates on some of the issues posed by this approach, proceeding then to consider the most ‘extreme’ instance of AWS, i.e. the deployment of swarms of drones operating autonomously and coordinating their behaviour in a decentralized manner.