United Nations : The Geneva meeting is expected to lead to an agreement to place the issue of “killer robots” firmly on the agenda of the UN Convention on Conventional Weapons.

Human Rights Watch stated on fundamental grounds an international ban is needed to ensure that humans will retain control over decisions to target and use force against other humans.

An international coalition of disarmament and human right groups has said that conference must consider the opportunity to seize and ban the fully autonomous weapons, dubbed “killer robots”.

The campaign to stop killer robots said that such weapons, once activated, would select and engage targets without human intervention.

Though they have yet to be fully developed, robotic systems with various degrees of autonomy and lethality are used by the US, Israel, Korea and UK other nations, including China and Russia. It is believed to be moving toward systems that would give full combat autonomy to machines, the campaign warned.

The US defense department issued a directive on 21 November 2012 that requires a human being to be “in the loop” when decisions are made about using lethal force, unless department officials waive the policy at a high level, HRW said.

However, it added that the directive was not a comprehensive or permanent solution to the potential problems posed by fully autonomous systems.

The campaign to stop autonomous weapons is an international coalition of civil society groups. It says a ban “should be achieved through an international treaty, as well as through national laws and other measures, to enshrine the principle that decisions to use violent force against a human being must always be made by a human being.