33 Latin American and Caribbean states issue the Belén Communiqué on autonomous weapons, Costa Rica (24 February 2023)

On Friday 24 February 2023, at the close of a two-day regional inter-governmental conference hosted by the Costa Rican Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the local non-governmental organisation FUNPADEM in Belén, in the San José metropolitan area, 33 Latin American and Caribbean states adopted the Belén Communiqué — the first time any region of the world had met outside the United Nations machinery in Geneva to call collectively for new international law on autonomous weapons systems. The communiqué committed participating states to "collaborate to promote the urgent negotiation of an international legally binding instrument, with prohibitions and regulations with regard to autonomy in weapons systems", and to do so to "prevent further dehumanization of warfare, as well as to ensure individual accountability and state responsibility". For the Stop Killer Robots coalition, the communiqué was the regional-bloc commitment that established, for the first time on the public diplomatic record, the political plausibility of moving the autonomous-weapons file out of the consensus-constrained Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) track in Geneva and into the majority-voting UN General Assembly process in New York — the strategic break the campaign's first decade of advocacy had been working toward.

Context

By early 2023 the autonomous-weapons file had been under multilateral discussion at the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in Geneva for nearly a decade — first in informal expert meetings from May 2014, and from December 2016 under a formal Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) mandate. The CCW operates by consensus, and through the late 2010s a small number of states — including, on the Stop Killer Robots account, the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, Israel, and South Korea — used the consensus rule to block movement toward a negotiating mandate. Through the same period a substantial cross-regional bloc of states had begun to call publicly for a binding instrument — Pakistan first in May 2013, followed in 2014 by Ecuador, Egypt, and the Holy See, and steadily by Latin American, African, European, and Pacific states — but no regional body had yet convened outside the UN machinery to issue a joint position.

The Costa Rica conference set out to do exactly that. Costa Rica is an in-principle natural host for humanitarian-disarmament work — a state with no standing army since 1948, a long record of constructive advocacy at the UN, and a Vice Minister for Foreign Affairs, Christian Guillermet-Fernández, who had spent years inside the CCW process and understood the consensus blockage from the inside. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs co-hosted the conference with the local NGO FUNPADEM and with the support of the Stop Killer Robots coalition. Maritza Chan, Costa Rica's Ambassador to the UN, acted as the coalition's principal diplomatic counterpart on the host side.

The inter-governmental meeting was preceded, in the same Costa Rican location on 20–22 February 2023, by the Stop Killer Robots coalition's "Digital Dehumanization Conference" — the campaign's first global gathering since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, bringing together 68 campaigners from 29 countries. The strategic sequencing was deliberate: a coalition-internal meeting to align messaging and roving advocacy, immediately followed by a regional-state conference at which the same coalition would brief participating delegations and amplify the resulting communiqué. Guillermet-Fernández addressed the closing session of the campaign's pre-meeting, telling campaigners that "we want to move forward with this important issue and right now. We cannot wait any longer."

What happened on the day

The inter-governmental conference convened on 23–24 February 2023 in Belén, Costa Rica — a canton in the Heredia Province, in the immediate San José metropolitan area, after which the resulting outcome document was named. Government representatives from nearly every state in Latin America and the Caribbean attended as participants. Thirteen states from outside the region attended as observers: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Nigeria, the Philippines, Russia, Switzerland, and the United States. The observer roster captured both the wider treaty-supportive bloc that would converge in the same year's UN General Assembly First Committee vote (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, Switzerland) and several states that had been part of the consensus blockage at the CCW (Russia, the United States) — a deliberate inclusivity reflecting the conference's regional-rather-than-multilateral framing.

The substantive programme paired regional-state working sessions with addresses from the UN system and from international civil society. Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, President of the International Committee of the Red Cross, addressed the conference, reiterating the ICRC's standing call for a legally binding instrument with prohibitions on autonomous weapons that target persons and that operate without meaningful human control. Izumi Nakamitsu, UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, addressed the conference on behalf of the UN Secretary-General — a procedural signal that the file was already being prepared, at the level of the UN system itself, for elevation out of the CCW. Bonnie Docherty, Human Rights Watch's Arms Division senior researcher and a longstanding figure inside Stop Killer Robots' diplomatic advocacy, presented on the humanitarian consequences of autonomous weapons systems. The Stop Killer Robots coalition itself — by then more than 200 NGOs across 70 countries — had a large delegation present and worked the corridors throughout.

The Belén Communiqué itself was adopted on the second day, 24 February 2023, by 33 Latin American and Caribbean states. The text opened with the observation that "emerging technologies pose concrete challenges to international peace and security, and raise new questions about the role of humans in warfare", affirmed that "it is paramount to maintain meaningful human control to prevent further dehumanization of warfare", and committed signatories to "collaborate to promote the urgent negotiation of an international legally binding instrument, with prohibitions and regulations with regard to autonomy in weapons systems". The two-track structure — prohibitions for the most concerning systems, regulation for the rest — reproduced the framing that had emerged from a decade of CCW expert work, and that the Stop Killer Robots coalition had argued for since its founding. Mexico and Trinidad and Tobago were among the states identified in press accounts as having welcomed further action in multiple multilateral venues following the adoption.

Significance

The Belén Communiqué is, on the public diplomatic record, the first regional-bloc state-coalition statement on autonomous weapons — the first time any region of the world met outside the United Nations machinery in Geneva to call collectively for the strengthening of the international legal framework on this question. That procedural distinction — regional-host, regional-bloc, outcome-document outside the CCW — was its central significance, and the political fact that made what followed possible.

What followed, in the same calendar year, was the strategic break the Stop Killer Robots campaign had been working toward since its founding. The Austrian Foreign Ministry, working with national coalitions and the Stop Killer Robots Steering Committee, drafted what became draft resolution L.56 over the months after Belén, tabling it in the UN General Assembly First Committee in October 2023; the resolution was adopted on 1 November 2023 by 164 votes in favour, 5 against, and 8 abstaining, with 43 co-sponsoring states. Costa Rica was a co-sponsor; so were a substantial fraction of the Belén signatories. The Belén Communiqué's regional-bloc commitment to seek "an international legally binding instrument" was, in this sense, the political pre-condition that the Austrian-led UNGA track was able to cite — and the Stop Killer Robots history of the file names it as exactly that.

The communiqué also set in motion a sequence of regional-and-cross-regional follow-on statements through the rest of 2023: a Central American Integration System (SICA) joint statement on 27 March 2023 echoing the Belén commitment, and an Iberoamerican summit special communiqué from 22 heads of state and government in March 2023 reinforcing it. The Vienna Conference on Autonomous Weapons Systems in April 2024, convened by Austria with 144 states and roughly 1,000 delegates in attendance, built directly on the same political ground, and the regional-bloc model the Belén meeting demonstrated has since been picked up in the Caribbean Community, the Pacific Islands Forum, and elsewhere.

For the broader make-AI-good movement this corpus is mapping, the Belén Communiqué matters on three connected counts. First, it is the first regional state-coalition statement on a class of weapons defined by software autonomy — the moment at which the question of whether and how machines should ever apply lethal force without a human in the loop was lifted out of multilateral expert process and onto the public diplomatic record of a regional bloc. Second, it demonstrates the substantive policy power of Global South host states acting outside the consensus-constrained UN machinery — Costa Rica, a small state with no standing army, convened the meeting and shaped its outcome, with the wider Latin American and Caribbean region acting as a substantive diplomatic counterweight to the major military powers that had blocked movement at the CCW. Third, it is the practical worked example of the Stop Killer Robots campaign's working theory of change — that a sustained civil-society coalition, paired with sympathetic host states and well-prepared regional fora, can produce the political ground on which UN majority-voting bodies can then move. The November 2023 First Committee vote, the August 2024 UN Secretary-General report calling for treaty negotiations to conclude by 2026, the May 2025 informal UNGA consultations in New York, and the September 2025 42-state joint statement at the Geneva GGE all sit downstream of the political fact established in Belén — a small Costa Rican canton whose name now appears in UN documents about military AI.