https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cilj/vol41/iss1/9/ has the download button and
https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1721&context=cilj has the content.
It is dated 2008 and you might want to skip to the conclusion before moving on to the 2022 information that follows.
2008 Conclusion
Despite the pronouncement by the International Court of Justice that international law has provided effective means of limiting the use of particularly horrific or indiscriminate weapons under international law, the historical record belies such a statement. Multilateral treaties have outlawed few weapons and have always done so after the weapons have proven outdated as a result of improvements in military technology. With the possible exception of the prohibition on blinding laser weapons, the customary law of war has not prohibited the use of weapons ex ante.
Although some have argued that new law is not necessary and that the greatest gains for international humanitarian law will occur if scholars and practitioners convince state parties to ratify existing treaties, the better view is that weapons such as neural-interfaced or autonomous drones represent a discrete advance in the history of warfare that will require novel legal instruments to regulate their development and use.
This is https://international-review.icrc.org/articles/international-humanitarian-law-making-and-new-military-technologies-920 from 2022.
One more comment. That ex ante inclusion above; I failed Latin numerous times in my youth, therefore I’m always looking for proper translation. This time there was a bonus included in the search. The stench of oligarch influence.
Abstract
Military technology has developed rapidly in recent years, and this development challenges existing norms. It has produced countless debates about the application of international humanitarian law (IHL) to areas of war and technology including cyber military operations, military artificial intelligence (including autonomous weapons), the use of drones, and military human enhancement. Despite these rapid progressions, the prospect of creating new treaties to specifically regulate their use by militaries and in armed conflicts is very low. This is largely due to the unequal allocation of military technology among States and the differing interests that result from this inequality. The absence of formal regulation means that State and non-state actors are increasingly embracing informal means of law-making. This is similar to other areas of IHL, such as the regulation of asymmetric conflicts, where norms are contested. In such cases, State and non-State actors employ various informal law-making techniques to advance their normative positions through treaty interpretation and the identification of customary international law.
However, the discussion on military technology differs from other contemporary IHL debates.
First, due to the rapid development of such technology and
uncertainty about how it will be employed in practice, the interests of the various actors are less clear. Second, there are significant challenges in obtaining accurate information about new military technologies. This makes even the informal law-making path in the context of new technologies more challenging.
* I would like to thank David Hughes and Arie Kacowicz for their valuable comments, and Danielle Regevfor her excellent research assistance.
International Review of the Red Cross (2022), 104 (920-921), 2131–2152.
How International Humanitarian Law Develops
doi:10.1017/S1816383122000443
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the ICRC 2131
This paper explores the dynamics of contemporary international law-making as it relates to the regulation of new military technologies. It identifies the main techniques that are used by the relevant actors and explores the common themes among the various debates over military technology, as well as the potential specific challenges in relation to certain technologies.
If after reading, any and all questions should be directed to your political representatives.