International Criminal Law and Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems: autonomy and accountability - Marta Bo

07/27/22 • 43 min

In this episode Dr Lauren Sanders will be speaking with Dr Marta Bo about her work analysing how individuals can be held to account for the potential misuse of LAWS; and how ICL can be used as a method to regulate the use of LAWS.
Dr Marta Bo is a researcher at the Asser Institute and the Graduate Institute for International and Development studies (Geneva). She is currently researching on criminal responsibility for war crimes committed with autonomous weapon systems (LAWS and War Crimes Project); AI and criminal responsibility; automation biases and mens rea for crimes committed with autonomous or automated systems; disarmament and criminalisation. She has published on international and transnational criminal law, artificial intelligence and criminal responsibility, autonomous weapons. Marta is also associate senior researcher at SIPRI.
Additional Resources:
SIPRI Emerging Military and Security Technologies Research

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Businesses and IHL - Fauve Kurnadi and Jonathan Kolieb

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In this episode, Dr Eve Massingham talks to Fauve Kurnadi of the Australian Red Cross and Dr Jonathon Kolieb of RMIT about how businesses are affected by, and should consider the application of IHL in situations of armed conflict.
Fauve is a Legal Adviser in the International Humanitarian Law Program of Australian Red Cross where she is responsible for the organisation’s engagement with corporate actors and academic circles. Fauve was recently named one of Pro Bono Australia’s Impact Award winners for her work in ensuring Australian businesses understand their responsibilities under the laws of war and play their part in creating better humanitarian outcomes for communities experiencing war.

Dr Jonathan Kolieb is Senior Lecturer in Law at RMIT University, where he is the Peace and Conflict Theme Lead at RMIT’s Business and Human Rights Centre. Jonathan’s research and teaching interests focus on global governance issues, including projects on the legal protections of children in armed conflict and the human rights obligations of transnational corporations, in particular in conflict-affected areas. Jonathan is the academic advisory member on the Victorian ARC IHL Committee.

Additional resources:

Jonathan Kolieb (2020) Don’t forget the Geneva Conventions: achieving responsible business conduct in conflict-affected areas through adherence to international humanitarian law, Australian Journal of Human Rights, 26:1, 142-164.
Red Cross, War, law and business: a module on international humanitarian law for future business leaders, 2022.
Red Cross, Seven indicators of corporate best practice in international humanitarian law, 2021
Red Cross, Doing Responsible Business in Armed Conflict: Risks, Rights and Responsibilities

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Drone visual, labels and cognitive bias in targeting operations and military fact finding - Shiri Krebs

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In this episode Dr Lauren Sanders speaks with Associate Professor Shiri Krebs about cognitive biases inherent in targeting operations and what that means for compliance with the laws of armed conflict.
The increased reliance on intelligence feeds from various remote sensors, and the fusion of these sensor feeds to make targeting decisions provides opportunity to entrench cultural and cognitive biases in armed conflict. Equally, the labels and interpretations ascribed to these sensor feeds impact the after action reviews, or fact finding or investigative processes that follow an engagement that results in civilian casualties. There have been many studies undertaken that demonstrate that data coming from machines is changes when it is interpreted by humans, and interpreted from that human’s cognitive and cultural frame, but what is the impact of this kind of bias in the context of targeting operations and compliance with LOAC?

Shiri is an Associate Professor T Deakin University’s Law Faculty, as well as the Co-lead of the Law and Policy Theme in the Australian Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC). In 2022 she was elected Chair of the Lieber Society on the Laws of Armed Conflict Chair (with the American Society of International Law), and she is an affiliated scholar at Stanford University’s Centre for International Security and cooperation (CISAC). Associate Professor Krebs has written and published broadly on algorithmic bias and drone data vulnerabilities, data privacy, and human-machine interaction in technology-assisted legal decision-making, at the intersection of law, science and technology. She teaches the outcomes of her work in many fora – including to governments and militaries; and her paper, “The Effects of Visual Evidence on the Application of International Humanitarian Law: A behavioural approach”, was awarded the 2021 David D. Caron Prize, awarded by the American Society of International Law.
Special thanks to Rosie Cavdarski for editing.

Additional resources:
Shiri Krebs, ‘Drone-Cinema, Data Practices, and the Narrative of IHL’ (2022) 82(2) Heidelberg Journal of International Law (forthcoming August 2022). Shiri Krebs, ‘Predictive Technologies and Opaque Epistemology in Counter-Terrorism Decision-Making’ in 9/11 and the Rise of Global Anti-Terrorism Law (Kim Lane Scheppele and Arianna Vedaschi, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2021), 199-221.
Shiri Krebs, ‘The Invisible Frames Affecting Wartime Investigations: Legal Epistemology, Metaphors, and Cognitive Biases’ in International Law’s Invisible Frames (Andrea Bianchi and Moshe Hirsch, eds., Oxford University Press, 2021), 124-140. ( recently shortlisted for the Australian Legal Research Awards (Article/Chapter (ECR) Category)).
Gavin Sullivan, 'Law, technology and data-driven security: infra-legalities as method assemblage, Journal of Law and Society, 2022
Fleur Johns - Data detection and the redistribution of the sensible in international law, 2017
Donna Haraway, 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Question of Partial Perspective, Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No.