17. Weapons reviews4 are an important part of national obligations to respect and ensure respect for IHL, and New Zealand supports their strengthening. While weapons reviews are necessary for AWS, New Zealand sees these as insufficient on their own to address concerns about AWS and should be supplemented with specific rules and limits. While there is a general obligation to conduct weapons reviews, there are no common standards which must be met, and no requirement to share results. There are also technical questions about how reliably reviews can assess how an AWS might operate on any given occasion given the nature of some autonomous functions.
4 Art 36, Protocol I additional to the 1949 Geneva Conventions.
New Zealand—Foreign Affairs and Trade, Autonomous Weapon Systems: New Zealand submission to the Secretary-General of the United Nations (May 2024) 5
