India, Autonomous Weapons, And The Effects- Based Premise Of International Humanitarian Law
- IJLLR Journal
- 3 days ago
- 1 min read
Varada Arora, O.P. Jindal Global University
ABSTRACT
As States approach the Seventh Review Conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in 2026, the question of whether to negotiate binding rules for lethal autonomous weapon systems remains open, and India occupies a striking position within it. Having chaired the Group of Governmental Experts that produced the first internationally agreed guiding principles on such weapons, India nonetheless voted against United Nations General Assembly Resolution 78/241. This essay argues that the doctrine underlying India's posture, that international humanitarian law regulates the effects of weapons rather than the technologies that produce them, so that existing law suffices, is internally coherent but unstable. The effects-based premise governs autonomy well, where a system merely executes a human judgement already made, but falls silent where the system performs the legal reasoning of distinction and proportionality itself. The instability is sharpest in the law of individual responsibility, which presupposes a human author whom autonomy displaces: the Kargu-2 deployment in Libya shows that the author dissolves in practice. India's stance is strategically rational, rooted in a consistent refusal of discriminatory arms-control bargains. That strategic logic explains why India wants the existing law to suffice without showing that it does.
