Policy Brief on Canada’s Position on Autonomous Weapons

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In this policy brief, entitled “Time for Canada to Take Stand on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems,” and published by the Center for International Governance and Innovation (CIGI-Online), I explain the current state of negotiations on autonomous weapons systems (AWS) within the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (the CCW), examine Canada’s studied ambiguity and neutral position within that process, and make the argument for why Canada should take a stand in support of a binding international treaty to govern AWS.

The full brief is available at the link above, but here are the “key points” and Introduction:

Key Points:

  • Canada has maintained an understandable posture of ambiguity on lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), particularly within the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) process.
  • Canada should now take a stand within the CCW and support the negotiations based on a “rolling text” — a proposed multilateral framework for governing LAWS that is the most developed yet produced.
  • The substance of the rolling text is closely aligned with Canada’s stated positions on ensuring meaningful human control, as well as insisting that all aspects of the development and deployment of LAWS must be subject to, and comply with, international humanitarian law (IHL). Canada’s substantive contributions to the Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) within the CCW — including working papers on algorithmic bias and IHL-based regulatory architecture — and its legacy in humanitarian treaty-making position it well to lead on shaping the proposed prohibitions and regulations.

Introduction: The Issues

Since the early 2010s, there have been debates over whether autonomous weapons systems (AWS) can fully comply with international humanitarian law (IHL), whether existing IHL treaty regimes can adequately govern the operation of AWS, and what form any new constraints on AWS should take. The primary forum for inter-state discussion of these issues has been within the institutional framework of the CCW, and since 2016, by the GGE within the CCW.

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The Tragic Demise of Japan’s Constitutional War Constraints

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Published a chapter entitled “The Tragic Demise of Japan’s Constitutional War Constraints,” the in an edited volume, The ‘Pacifist Principle’ in the Italian and Japanese Constitutions in the Wake of the War in Ukraine, Giovanni Cavaggion ed., (Springer, 2026), which came out of the conference at the University of Milan last year. The full chapter is available on SSRN, and the abstract is below:

Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan famously prohibits the use of force and the maintenance of armed forces and “other war potential.” For seven decades this provision effectively shaped national policy, constraining the government from any use of force and, to a lesser extent, moderating Japan’s national security posture. It also helped define Japan’s postwar constitutional identity. This chapter examines the process and implications of how Article 9 has been illegitimately undermined over the last decade.

First, it explains the traditional understanding and effective operation of Article 9, from its first authoritative interpretation in 1954 through 2014. Second, it analyzes the Abe administration’s process of “reinterpretation” in 2014–2015, which gutted the clear and effective constitutional constraint on the use of force in paragraph one, and explains why this was not a valid informal amendment but an unconstitutional circumvention of the formal amendment procedure. Third, it examines how Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was used as an opportunity to complete the evisceration of Article 9, with a new national security strategy that entrenched the reinterpretation and sidelined the less effective prohibition on armed forces and other war potential.

The chapter closes with reflections on the tragic nature of this demise: Article 9 was a unique experiment in constitutional incorporation of international law constraints on the use of force. Its illegitimate subversion is significant not only for constitutionalism and the rule of law in Japan, but for the broader project of subjecting state use of force to meaningful legal limits—at a time when that project is under increasing strain internationally.

Nuclear-Powered AI: The Risks of De-Regulation

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Mike Kelly and I continued our collaboration on AI issues, with an essay in Just Security entitled “Nuclear-Powered AI: The Risks of De-Regulation,” in which we analyze the risks associated with the Trump administration’s coordinated loosening of regulation in AI development, nuclear energy deployment, and environmental review. The government is relaxing regulation in all three areas in order to facilitate the development of nuclear energy — particularly small modular reactors — for purposes of providing power to the ever spreading and expanding AI data centers. While the use of nuclear energy has some appeal from a climate change perspective, the coordinated relaxation of regulations in all three areas raises significant risks, which we explore and explain.

New Substack – Law in Crisis

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I have launched a new substack, entitled Law in Crisis, which some might find interesting. As the masthead explains, it is a forum for “musings on how law can help our response to crises, and how to respond to the crisis in law itself – use of force and armed conflict, climate change and security, AI and security, constitutional and int’l human rights, and the rule of law more generally.”  The plan is to publish an essay of between one to two thousand words at least once a week.