This Report provides a summary of the Third Expert Meeting on the Legal Review of Autonomous Weapons Systems, which was convened by the Australian Government, in collaboration with the Asia-Pacific Institute for Law and Security, in Geneva from 10–11 March 2025. This Meeting built upon the first and second expert meetings, which took place in Sydney in 2023 and 2024. The stated aim of this Meeting was to enhance State practice in legal reviews through the voluntary sharing of national practices. This was achieved on the first day of the Meeting by governmental experts providing presentations about their national practices as they pertain to the conduct of legal reviews, in particular the review of autonomous weapon systems, and autonomous or artificial intelligence-enabled capabilities more specifically. A summary of the national presentations is included in Part 2 of this report. In addition to facilitating information sharing on national legal review practices, this Meeting undertook to reflect on initiatives by the International Committee of the Red Cross, civil society and academia in support of national legal review practice. A summary of this update is included in Parts 3 and 4 of this report.
This chapter examines when alleged criminal conduct by members of the armed forces should be handled by military justice systems and when by ordinary civilian courts. Drawing primarily on Australian law, and engaging in comparative analysis with Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, the chapter explores the circumstances in which jurisdictional overlaps arise and how they are resolved in practice. The chapter opens with recent high-profile examples of offences committed by military personnel being channelled to civilian courts, including alleged war crimes committed by members of the Australian Defence Force in Afghanistan and sexual misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces, before surveying debates about the legitimacy and design of separate military justice systems. The chapter explains how conflicts of jurisdiction arise — shaped by the nature of the offence and the place where it was committed — and identifies the mechanisms states use to resolve them, including statutory constraints and formal protocols between military and civilian prosecutors. The core of the analysis sets out the factors that guide prosecutorial choice: fair and efficient justice, military discipline, the public interest, the seriousness of the offence, national security, resourcing, and the wishes of complainants. The authors argue that while this discretionary framework produces some uncertainty, it is preferable to rigid rules, provided both systems comply with basic fair-trial standards.
Many weapons operate within complex computerized systems, and are integrated with sensors and platforms. Armed forces rely extensively on digital battlefield management and decision support systems. Exploitation of vulnerabilities in such systems can render them unreliable or unusable, which can adversely affect national security and lead to losses of human life. This paper seeks to establish, first, whether states have an obligation under international law to take cybersecurity measures with respect to weapon systems. Second, the paper examines whether states have, to comply with their legal obligations or otherwise, set cybersecurity requirements, standards, or guidelines that apply to weapon systems, either by articulating them or referring to previously existing standards that apply to cyber–physical systems.