A Hazard to Human Rights: Autonomous Weapons Systems and Digital Decision-Making

A Hazard to Human Rights: Autonomous Weapons Systems and Digital Decision-Making is a 61-page report jointly published by Human Rights Watch and Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic on 28 April 2025. The report was researched and written under the lead authorship of Bonnie Docherty — HRW's senior arms advisor and Director of IHRC's Armed Conflict and Civilian Protection Initiative — and was released two weeks ahead of the 12–13 May 2025 UN informal consultations on autonomous weapons systems in New York. The report is positioned as the direct successor to the 2014 HRW / IHRC report Shaking the Foundations: The Human Rights Implications of Killer Robots, expanding that report's analysis to address three additional rights and principles, and is the human-rights-law counterpart to the 2012 Losing Humanity report's international-humanitarian-law argument.

The report's central claim is that autonomous weapons systems — which select and apply force to targets based on sensor inputs rather than human inputs — would contravene the rights to life, peaceful assembly, privacy, and remedy as well as the principles of human dignity and non-discrimination, both during armed conflict and in peacetime law-enforcement and surveillance contexts. The argument is anchored in the concept of digital dehumanization, which the report defines as the process by which humans are reduced to data and then targeted on the basis of proxies such as weight, heat, or sound rather than as people; allowing autonomous systems to identify and apply force on this basis is framed as a categorical attack on human dignity rather than only a problem of accountability or precision. On the basis of these claims the report calls on states to negotiate a new international treaty that ensures meaningful human control over the use of force and prohibits autonomous weapons systems that inherently operate without meaningful human control or that target people, with regulations to ensure that any autonomous weapons systems not covered by the prohibitions operate only with meaningful human control. The report records that more than 120 states are now on record calling for such an instrument.

Within the corpus, A Hazard to Human Rights is the second Publication anchored on the military side of the AI-good landscape and the second HRW-published report in the corpus, exercising the org-as-publisher pattern for the second time with HRW after Losing Humanity. Where Losing Humanity opened the autonomous-weapons campaign in the language of international humanitarian law and battlefield use, A Hazard to Human Rights extends the case into peacetime — into how autonomous force-application systems would interact with policing, protest, surveillance, and migration enforcement — and supplies the human-rights-law arm of the same treaty effort that the Stop Killer Robots coalition has carried since its April 2013 launch. The report's release timing — two weeks before the May 2025 UN informal consultations — is itself part of the coalition's strategic register: the report functions as both an analytical artefact and a movement input into a specific UN moment, paired with HRW's 21 May 2025 follow-up statement calling on states to begin formal treaty negotiations.