China forces thousands of Tibetans into labour camps
More than half a million people in Tibet have been coerced by Chinese authorities into a labour program so far this year, moving rural labourers into ‘military-style’ camps to retrain them to work in factories in the textile and construction industries. A Reuters-corroborated report, by the Jamestown Foundation also found that Chinese authorities have set quotas for the mass transfer of these re-trained workers to other parts of Tibet and China.
Tibet is a predominantly Buddhist, autonomous region of China and the situation there has been compared to the well reported Uighur ‘re-education’ camps in the Xingjiang region of China. The independent Tibet and Xingjiang researcher who drafted the findings, Adrian Zenz, said “It’s a coercive lifestyle change from nomadism and farming to wage labor.” Zenz makes particular reference to similarities with Xinjiang, stressing that the focus is on “military-style training management to produce discipline and obedience” and the need to change “thinking and identity” and “weaken the perceived negative influence of religion”. The policy documents examined show that in addition to vocational skills training, something called “gratitude education” is included to boost loyalty to the Party.
According to the Chinese government, the program is designed to develop “work discipline, Chinese language and work ethics” and change “can’t do, don’t want to do and don’t dare to do” attitudes towards work. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs made a statement to Reuters, saying that reports of ‘forced labor’ are lies and all workers are involved in the program voluntarily and are properly compensated.
Two weeks ago, a global coalition of 321 civil society groups from 6 countries urged the UN to tackle China’s human rights violations through an independent international mechanism. John Fisher, Geneva director at Human Rights Watch said the global coalition, which includes 50 UN experts, organisations and governments, “are all demanding an end to China’s impunity at the UN Human Rights Council”.
Meanwhile, at the UN General Assembly this week, as Trump and Xi face off, UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres warned the international community about the perils of a “great fracture” between the two largest economies of the US and China, saying “we must to everything to avoid a new Cold War”.
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Last month, an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm was pitted against a human pilot in simulated F-16 fighter jet dogfights. The AI pilot won, 5-0. The US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) hosted the ‘AlphaDogfight’ Trials as part of the Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program, which looks at future possibilities of teaming machines with humans to enhance defence capability through “complex multi-aircraft scenarios”.
This article will look at the issues raised by removing the human element from lethal action, before outlining the growing calls, from the human rights community, for a ban on autonomous weapons. First, though, it is worth taking a step back to understand how we got here, through a brief history of the use of unmanned drones, the precursor to fully autonomous weapons.
A brief history of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)
The use of pilotless aircraft for surveillance during conflict emerged during the Vietnam War with the US using what they called “Lightning Bugs” on reconnaissance missions. The Israeli Defence Force (IDF), too has used drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) since the 1970s, as decoys and intelligence gathering vehicles, during wars with Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.
The merging of these robotic eyes-in-the-sky with lethal weaponry would be a pivotal moment for post 9/11 policy making and play a significant role in what President Bush called “a different kind of war”, in which the risk to American military personnel was removed through delivering death by remote control.
The use of remotely piloted drones to assassinate the enemy, rather than risking troops on the ground, found favour, particularly following the catastrophe of the Iraq war and the deeply damaging CIA torture program, and became a go-to counter-terrorism tool for Obama. The low risk to American lives and the often-sold precision accuracy of drones gave them an ‘ethical’ flavour that appealed to those who wanted revenge with a clean conscience. It was a way for Obama to appear tough on terrorists, but maintain his Nobel Peace Prize winning status as a man who espoused human rights and the rule of law.
Along with indefinite detention without trial in Guantanamo Bay, the drone program is one of the few surviving policies of the War on Terror, now into its 20th year. Claims of the precision accuracy of drones, though, have been challenged by various studies in the countries of their operation, including Yemen and Afghanistan, where drone strikes were found to be “10 times more likely to kill civilians than conventional aircraft”. In July 2020, on publishing her report into the drone assassination of Iranian General Soleimani, the UN Rapporteur on Extrajudicial and Arbitrary Execution, Agnes Callamard described the surgical precision of drones as a “myth”.
Removing the human from lethal action
Removing the human from battlefield operations is given as a significant advantage by operating states, claiming that machines are less likely to make mistakes and offer higher levels of precision and lower risk to military personnel. The AlphaDogfight trials also exposed the fear, or feeling of “self-preservation”, of the human pilot as a limiter in performing risky manoeuvres that might provide an edge in battle. The Pentagon’s Director for Research and Engineering for modernisation, Mark Lewis, said that the advantage of an AI pilot is that it will be prepared to “do things that a human pilot wouldn’t do”.
Whilst this lack of fear may appear advantageous, it serves to illustrate the argument against fully autonomous weapons; they don’t have human attributes that indeed include fear for themselves, but also compassion towards others. They are, in effect, weapons of dehumanisation, with no ability to recognise the humanity in those they fight against, or any way to distinguish between combatants and civilians. As things stand, the use of remotely controlled drones, operated by ‘pilots’ that are stationed thousands of miles away from the target, has seen lethal strikes that have caused catastrophic civilian casualties through a misinterpretation of activities including weddings, funerals and jirgas (traditional community assemblies), that were wrongly assumed to be terrorism related.
Jeremy Scahill, author of The Assassination Complex, refers to this as the ‘tyranny of distance’, a phrase borrowed from the 1966 book about the precariousness of Australia’s isolation and distance from its coloniser. The lives of the Yemeni, Pakistani, Afghani and Somali targets of drone strikes are indeed permanently precarious, and the distance of the innocent victims of robotised drone violence makes them invisible, not just to the ‘pilots’ of the drones themselves, who initiate the strike, but also to the publics of those governments who deploy such weapons.
Political theorist and author of Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer has voiced his concerns about drones, stressing that their advantages make their use easier and more likely and this should trouble us, as the traditional reciprocal risks of going to war add weight to jus ad bellum considerations. Removing the human from one side of the battle with the enemy has been described by some as “remote controlled hunting” , with the moral equality of combat removed due to a lack of risk reciprocity.
Further, as the development of these hi-tech weapons depends on the depth of defence budgets, asymmetries of power and violence have resulted in violations of human rights in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq and Libya, where communities live in constant fear of strikes. These are communities that have been psychologically traumatised, their privacy denied and their cultural and religious practices undermined. As a Stanford Law School study in Pakistan concluded, innocent men, women and children have been killed simply by dint of their behaviour such as gathering in groups, or carrying weapons, considered, by the United States to be consistent with terrorist activity.
Imagine, then, the spectre of full autonomy in the use of armed drones, offering the prospect that such behavioural ‘signatures’ could be programmed into targeting algorithms that would totally disregard any cultural context.
Calls for a ban
As yet, there is still little in the way of international law to specifically regulate the use of drones or autonomous weapons, other than International Humanitarian Law (IHL), – a.k.a the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) – which covers areas of operation within zones of existing armed conflict; or International Human Rights Law (IHRL), which requires the justification of self-defence, limited by necessity and proportionality for any counter-terrorism operations.
Furthermore, there are ambiguities around the use of IHRL extraterritorially, which allows the US to sidestep accountability on a technicality, namely Article 2 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which limits the obligations of a state to “ all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction”. In addition, the state of exception that ushered in Bush’s “different kind of war” has become permanent, and the ability to flout international law under the guise of a universal project of global security and human rights, has slipped quietly under the radar, with the suffering of thousands of innocent victims out-of-sight.
The United States position on negotiating a new international treaty on fully autonomous weapons is that it is “premature”, arguing that IHL, as it currently stands, is sufficient. Rather interestingly, China supports a ban on the use of autonomous weapons, but not on their development as they currently seek to develop themselves as a hi-tech military superpower, with a focus on machine-learning, AI and autonomous weapons systems. The United Kingdom, meanwhile, joined the United States in insisting that existing IHL is adequate and “has no plans to call for or to support an international ban” on such weapons. Opposition parties in Germany too have called on Chancellor Merkel to take a tough stand on the issue, arguing that without restraints, there is a very real danger of a new arms race. However, Merkel’s coalition voted down the motion, and critics point to German arms sales of “new weapons with autonomous functions” as playing a key role in that vote.
Conclusion
The Vice President of Heron, the small Maryland company that developed the algorithm that won the dogfight competition, said that despite ethics concerns, it is important to forge ahead with employing AI within military hardware because “if the United States doesn’t adopt these technologies, somebody else will.” Such a position simply ensures an acceleration of the race towards a global proliferation of robotic violence, noted by UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres in his 2020 Report on Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict. In the report, he stressed the “moral and ethical issues in allowing technology to decide whether to take a human life”, adding that the current absence of debate “leaves a policy vacuum that has to be addressed by Member States.”
In his Nobel Peace Prize speech, Obama’s warning-cum-US national security strategy, that “modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale”, would become the modus-operandi of the War on Terror. If the international community does not come together to curtail the further development of unmanned and autonomous lethal weapons, those few small men will become many.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pauline Canham is the HRC Blog’s student editor. Pauline is studying a Masters Degree in Human Rights and Cultural Diversity at Essex, after 20 years in the broadcasting sector, working for the BBC and AlJazeera, with a focus on large change projects including the BBC’s move into the new Broadcasting House in 2013, and the re-launch of Al Jazeera’s Arabic Channel in 2016.
UK government considers human rights ‘opt-out’ to speed up asylum seeker deportations
The UK government is currently resisting requests by Brussels to give a formal undertaking to adhere to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), as part of Brexit negotiations. The areas of ‘opt-out’ being considered would, as well as making it easier to deport refugees and asylum seekers, protect British troops from legal action, following operations overseas.
The government also pledged, in the Conservative Party manifesto, to “update the UK Human Rights Act” , following Brexit, and claim the issue is a matter of UK “sovereignty”. Meanwhile, evidence presented to the Joint Committee on Human Rights, this week, from ClearView Research, showed that 75% of black people in the UK “do not believe their rights are equally protected compared to white people”, 85% do not trust the police to treat them equally and 60% don’t feel that their health is equally protected by the NHS.
Human Rights Watch have said that the UK’s refusal to agree to respect European human rights law “risks EU cooperation on security and criminal justice” that helps to protect British citizens. Civil rights organisation, Liberty, said that the government’s intention to ‘update’ the Act is “dangerously misguided” and is heading to an environment of “some rights for some people some of the time”
Justice Secretary, Robert Buckland, dismissed the reports that the UK is planning to opt out of the ECHR, saying “such suggestions are for the birds”, adding that we should be focused on ‘streamlining’ our own laws. David Lammy slammed the idea, saying that abandoning human rights would “make life in Britain less secure and hold our country back on the world stage”.
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Huge fire destroys refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos
Almost 13,000 asylum seekers have been left homeless by a blaze, reportedly started by migrants unhappy at being isolated by COVID19 rules in the Moria camp. Fires broke out in three places and were whipped up by strong winds which spread the flames quickly through the camp, the largest on Lesbos. There are also reports that wildfires were already burning in the area and some suggest far right Greeks were involved with igniting the fire. Lesbos project co-ordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Marco Sandrone, told the BBC that determining the cause of the blaze was difficult with “several different fires and protests erupting in the camp” but that it was a “time bomb that finally exploded”.
The camp was over four times its maximum capacity and had been criticised by aid agencies for its “appalling conditions”. Thousands of people are now sleeping on the streets, with no protection from the elements and many families have lost the little belongings they had, fleeing with just the clothes on their backs. NGOs have been prevented by police from transporting people to hospitals and a cordon has been set up around the camp, preventing aid workers from getting in.
Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis said a state of emergency had been declared for all of Lesbos and the EU commissioner for home affairs has offered to arrange funding for the transfer of 400 unaccompanied minors to the Greek mainland. Meanwhile, the UNHCR and Doctors Without Borders have offered their assistance while officials are seeking tents to accommodate the thousands displaced and the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia has pledged to take in 1,000 of the refugees.
Just the day before, campaigners had placed 13,000 chairs outside the German parliament building, in a symbolic protest at conditions at the Moria camp, calling for its closure. The camp is designed to hold just 2,800. In total, there are 24,000 people in five camps on Greek islands that were built to house just 6,100. There are no immediate reports of casualties.
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5 years on from the crisis of 2015, migrants continue to die
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) estimates that 554 migrants have died this year in attempts to cross the Mediterranean to Europe. During the migration crisis in 2015, 3030 people are believed to have drowned between January and August. In one incident in the last few days, a boat carrying dozens of migrants burst into flames as it was approached by the Italian Navy. Red Cross commissioner, Francesco Pascuzzo confirmed that up to seven migrants were feared missing and four were in hospital with serious burns. The remaining survivors were transferred to a “welcome centre”. The Mayor of Lampedusa has expressed his frustration as hundreds of migrants have arrived there in recent weeks, and has called for the whole island to go on “strike”. “We can’t manage the emergency and the situation is now really unsustainable” he said.
A vessel funded by Banksy, which rescued 200 people, over its safe capacity, was struggling to find a port to allow the migrants to disembark but was finally supported by the Italian Navy and a German charity rescue ship, after the UN Refugee Agency and IOM both called for European co-operation in allowing the migrants to be brought to shore. Five years after the peak of the migrant crisis in 2015, there is still no agreement on a mechanism for managing the hundreds rescued at sea.
Meanwhile more migrants are making the perilous journey across the English Channel, with 1450 making the crossing in August from France to Britain’s beaches. In a concerning development, the UK is planning to use hi-tech military drones, more used to operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, to provide an eye-in-the-sky over the channel. A spokesman for the MoD said: “The deployment of Watchkeeper provides further defence support to the Home Office in tackling the increasing number of small boats crossing the English Channel.”
The plight of African migrants is not confined to Europe. Mobile phone footage emerged this week showing conditions inside a coronavirus detention centre in Saudi Arabia. The detention centres are said to be an effort to control COVID19, known to spread among migrant workers who are housed in cramped conditions. The footage exposes tightly packed rows of emaciated men, scarred by signs of torture and detainees claim they are beaten with electrical wires and tell stories of those who have committed suicide after losing hope. Adam Coogle, deputy director of Human Rights Watch in the Middle East said the men are being held in “squalid, crowded, and dehumanising conditions, with no regard for their safety or dignity.”
Other stories making the headlines around the world
More than half a million people in Tibet have been coerced by Chinese authorities into a labour program so far this year, moving rural labourers into ‘military-style’ camps to retrain them to work in factories in the textile and construction industries. A Reuters-corroborated report, by the Jamestown Foundation also found that Chinese authorities have set quotas for the mass transfer of these re-trained workers to other parts of Tibet and China.
The UK government is currently resisting requests by Brussels to give a formal undertaking to adhere to the 
Almost 13,000 asylum seekers have been left homeless by a 
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) estimates that 