Stop Killer Robots' decade-plus advocacy for a binding international treaty on autonomous weapons (2012–ongoing)

Since October 2012, the Stop Killer Robots coalition has run the longest sustained civil-society advocacy effort in the military-AI space on the public record — a multi-track campaign aimed at a new legally binding international instrument prohibiting autonomous weapons systems that target people or operate without meaningful human control, and regulating all other autonomous weapons to preserve such control. The campaign sits in the humanitarian-disarmament tradition that produced the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty and the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, and applies that tradition for the first time to a class of weapons defined by software autonomy rather than by physical effect. By late 2025 the campaign had grown from seven founding NGOs to more than 270 across 70 or more countries; it had moved the file from the consensus-blocked Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) track in Geneva into a UN General Assembly process in New York; and it had a UN Secretary-General report on record calling for treaty negotiations to conclude by 2026.

Origins (October 2012 – April 2013): seven NGOs and the humanitarian-disarmament template

The coalition was founded by representatives of seven non-governmental organisations at a meeting in New York on 19 October 2012 and held its global launch at an NGO conference in London in April 2013. The original founders — Article 36, Human Rights Watch, the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), IKV Pax Christi (now PAX), Mines Action Canada, the Nobel Women's Initiative, and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs — between them carried direct organising experience from the campaigns that produced the Mine Ban Treaty (1997) and the Convention on Cluster Munitions (2008), and the new campaign's theory of change was an explicit transposition of that template: a treaty cannot be secured by insider diplomacy alone, but by a sustained coalition that pairs UN advocacy with public-facing engagement of faith communities, scientists, survivors, parliamentarians, and the press until governments arrive at multilateral fora already politically obligated to move. Mary Wareham, advocacy director of Human Rights Watch's Arms Division, served as global coordinator from 2013 to March 2021, with HRW housing the campaign's coordination function before the establishment of a dedicated Geneva-based secretariat. Pakistan became the first state to call for a prohibition in May 2013, followed in 2014 by Ecuador, Egypt, and the Holy See.

The CCW years (2014–2022): GGE work and the consensus block

From May 2014, states began discussing lethal autonomous weapons systems under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in Geneva — first as a series of informal expert meetings (87 states at the first), then from December 2016 under a formal Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) mandate established at the CCW Review Conference. The GGE was a meaningful procedural achievement and the venue at which much of the substantive work on definitions, human-control formulations, and IHL compatibility was done; it was also constrained by the CCW's consensus rule, which gave any single state a veto over substantive outputs. Through the late 2010s a small number of major military powers — including the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, Israel, and South Korea — used that rule to keep the GGE short of a negotiating mandate, even as the count of states publicly supporting a binding instrument climbed steadily through the same period.

In parallel, the coalition built up the political ground beneath the CCW process. In December 2014 a group of Nobel Peace Laureates led by the Dalai Lama issued a declaration supporting "a pre-emptive ban on fully autonomous weapons." A January 2015 open letter presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires gathered more than 1,000 AI and robotics researchers — including Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, and Stuart Russell — warning of the dangers of a military-AI arms race. In June 2018, following sustained internal organising by Google employees, the company withdrew from Project Maven and adopted AI principles barring weapons applications — a direct corporate-policy outcome of the campaign's adjacent organising on tech-worker accountability. A December 2018 Ipsos poll across 26 countries found 61% of adults surveyed opposed to lethal autonomous weapons. In November 2020, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for a ban at the Paris Peace Forum, stating that machines with the power to take human lives were "morally repugnant." Pope Francis added his voice in September 2020 and again at the G7 in June 2024.

Public-engagement tactics: faith, science, youth, and #VoteAgainstTheMachine

Across the campaign's first decade, the coalition has run a distinctive public-engagement programme that complements its multilateral track. The Automated by Design touring exhibition — launched on 13 October 2023 in New York during UNGA, produced by Identity 2.0 with Soka Gakkai International and Amnesty International — uses interactive multimedia and a documentary film, shot across London, Nabi Saleh in the occupied Palestinian territories, Nairobi, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo, to ground the abstract policy framing of "digital dehumanisation" in lived experience outside the multilateral capitals. The #VoteAgainstTheMachine framing, deployed around UN General Assembly votes from 2023 onward, converts the multilateral cycle itself into a public-engagement moment. National coalitions — currently active in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Ireland, the Philippines, Italy, and elsewhere — run parliamentary briefings, public demonstrations, and citizen-survey work that funnel into the global campaign. The coalition was awarded the Ypres Peace Prize in 2020, nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize by Norwegian MP Audun Lysbakken, and awarded the Golden Doves for Peace in 2024.

Substantively, the campaign's research and country-tracking work is anchored in Automated Decision Research, the coalition's in-house monitoring and research team led by Manager Dr Catherine Connolly, whose country-by-country position tracking and briefing material is used by negotiators and journalists across CCW, GGE, and UNGA cycles.

The UNGA breakout (2023): the Belén Communiqué and Resolution L.56

The campaign's strategic break came in 2023. In February 2023, 33 Latin American and Caribbean states issued the Belén Communiqué in Costa Rica calling for urgent negotiation of a legally binding instrument — a regional bloc commitment that established the political plausibility of moving the file out of the CCW. On 1 November 2023, the UN General Assembly First Committee adopted Resolution L.56, the first stand-alone UN General Assembly resolution on autonomous weapons. The resolution — tabled by Austria with 43 co-sponsoring states, including Germany, Italy, Mexico, and New Zealand — was adopted by 164 votes in favour, 5 against, and 8 abstaining. It mandated a report from the UN Secretary-General on the humanitarian, legal, security, technological, and ethical dimensions of autonomous weapons, and placed LAWS on the General Assembly's agenda — moving primary diplomatic responsibility from the consensus-constrained CCW in Geneva to the majority-voting UNGA in New York.

The Secretary-General's August 2024 report called on states to conclude treaty negotiations by 2026 — prohibiting weapons that operate without human control or that cannot be used in compliance with international humanitarian law, and regulating all other autonomous weapons. The report was the single most consequential UN-system document the campaign had secured in twelve years of work, and it set the explicit deadline against which subsequent campaigning has been organised.

Toward a treaty (2024–2025): Vienna, Resolution 79/62, New York consultations, and the 42-state statement

The April 2024 Vienna Conference on Autonomous Weapons Systems, convened by Austria, assembled 144 states and roughly 1,000 delegates and concluded with a chair's summary affirming commitment to new international law. On 2 December 2024, UNGA Resolution 79/62 — tabled by Austria with 27 co-sponsors — passed 166 in favour, 3 against (Belarus, North Korea, Russia), and 15 abstaining (China, India, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Ukraine and others). The resolution approved open informal consultations in New York during 2025 to consider the Secretary-General's report; Mary Wareham, by then deputy director of HRW's Crisis, Conflict and Arms division, framed the vote as a moment for governments to "move from talking about this challenge to negotiating a new treaty."

The first UN General Assembly informal consultations on autonomous weapons convened in New York on 12–13 May 2025 with delegations from 96 states — the first time the file had been substantively worked at the UNGA level rather than under the CCW. At the September 2025 GGE meeting in Geneva, Brazil delivered a joint statement on behalf of 42 states declaring readiness to move to negotiations on a legally binding instrument — a substantive break from the consensus-constrained CCW track and the clearest cross-regional articulation to date that the campaign's UNGA-anchored strategy had a critical mass.

The campaign's current leadership reflects the transition from the HRW-housed era to a coalition-led one. Nicole van Rooijen joined as Executive Director in January 2025, coming from more than a decade at the International Committee of the Red Cross, most recently as ICRC's Head of Protection for Asia Pacific.

Tactics and posture

Across thirteen years, the campaign has settled into a recognisable repertoire: a Geneva-based secretariat and Steering Committee co-ordinating multilateral advocacy at the CCW, the GGE, the UN First Committee, and the UN General Assembly; an in-house research arm in Automated Decision Research that produces the country-by-country analysis underpinning that advocacy; touring public-engagement programmes such as Automated by Design; cross-sectoral mobilisation of faith leaders (the Dalai Lama, Pope Francis, the Holy See), Nobel laureates, scientific and robotics researchers, and survivor and humanitarian-disarmament communities; and national coalitions in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Ireland, the Philippines, Italy, and elsewhere that translate the global campaign into domestic parliamentary and public organising. The campaign's framing — "meaningful human control"; "digital dehumanisation"; the explicit invocation of the Mine Ban Treaty and Convention on Cluster Munitions precedents — has carried into UN documents, press coverage, and the position papers of newer AI-policy organisations across the corpus.

Significance for the broader AI-good movement

For the wider make-AI-good movement that this corpus is mapping, the campaign matters on three connected counts. First, it is the longest sustained civil-society advocacy effort on the public record directly engaged with what the corpus would call military-AI governance — predating the current AI-safety policy wave by about a decade and demonstrating that a treaty-track theory of change can be sustained across more than thirteen years and across more than ten UN cycles. Second, the campaign has been a working laboratory for the kind of coalition that newer AI-policy organising now treats as standard: a Steering Committee that bridges disarmament, human-rights, and faith communities; a research arm that anchors advocacy in country-by-country tracking; touring public-engagement programmes that root abstract policy questions in lived experience outside the multilateral capitals; and national coalitions that translate the global campaign into domestic parliamentary work. Several of the corpus's newer organisations — youth-led groups such as Encode Justice, which has worked on US federal restrictions on AI in nuclear-weapons command-and-control — explicitly cite autonomous-weapons advocacy as part of their inheritance, and several Stop Killer Robots member organisations (Human Rights Watch, PAX, Article 36) routinely intersect with the civil-liberties, surveillance, and bias-audit communities the corpus also tracks. Third, the campaign's enduring contribution has been to make the question of whether and how machines should ever apply lethal force without a human in the loop a question that civil-society organising can move at the UN — and to do so on a treaty-by-2026 deadline that the next year of corpus entries will continue to test against.