The Gatekeepers of International Human Rights

Abstract

“Lost” Causes: Agenda Vetting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security. By Charli Carpenter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. 234 pp., $24.95 paperback (ISBN-13 978-0-8014-7604-4), $79.95 hardcover (ISBN-13 978-0-8014-4885-0). In a book that deserves widespread attention from many academic and practitioner quarters, Charli Carpenter reviews attempts to raise new issues onto the agenda of the international human rights community. Rather than looking at triumphs, however, she focuses on failures. Consider “killer robots.” We are familiar with drones, but what about “fully autonomous” war robots which would make targeting decision with no human “in the loop?” She writes (p. 88) that the US military has been seeking proposals for such weapons since at least 2005, that Israel and South Korea have deployed robots with the capacity to make autonomous targeting decisions in border areas, and that several other countries are developing such systems. Ethicists and robotics experts have noted that there is virtually no way a robot could be programmed to distinguish a true belligerent from an innocent bystander, and therefore, a case could be made that naturally the deployment of such machines should be banned by international treaty. On the other hand, and this is Carpenter's point, it takes much more than a good idea to get a consensus in the international human rights community. Noel Sharkey, a roboticist at the University of Sheffield, agitated successfully for attention to this issue within the communities of ethics and robotics, but could not personally turn this into an international human rights campaign. In his words: All I am is an academic with some access to the media and some technical expertise, but I don't see myself talking to the UN or something. I'm talking to Landmine Action, and I'd be happy to take a backseat and leave it with …