New weapons systems may breach international law

The law, as Edward Snowden’s disclosures revealed, cannot keep up with developments in intrusive surveillance technology.

There is now increasing concern that the law will not be able to keep up with the development of new weapons systems.

“The rate of change of technology”, warns a Ministry of Defence thinktank report looking ahead to 2035, would require “a more increasingly agile, perhaps radical approach” to enable commanders to be effective.

It adds: “The risk is that law and policy, alongside ethical and moral considerations, might lag behind thereby constraining the employment of cutting-edge technology.”

Now, a former senior RAF officer warns that stealth technology could be outlawed under the Geneva convention clause entitled “prohibition of perfidy”.

The warning comes from Bill Boothby, a former air commodore and deputy director of RAF legal services.

He warns that “invisibility cloaks” and other future advances in military camouflage techniques could violate the Geneva conventions in Weapons and the Law of Armed Conflict, published this month by Oxford University Press.

Scientists and military contractors are spending tens of millions of pounds researching methods to generate invisibility through substances designed to absorb or bend light and radar waves to conceal approaching aircraft or troops.

Companies, including Britain’s BAE, are already developing “invisibility cloaks” around tanks.

“An object can be made to disappear into the background for an observer using an infrared sensor; it can also be used to mimic the infrared reading of a different vehicle, so a tank looks like a civilian car, for example”, says Boothby.

Under article 37 of the 1949 Geneva conventions, ruses such as camouflage, decoys, mock operations and misinformation are all permitted.

However, if camouflage is used to pretend to be a non-combatant in order to deceive the enemy and thereby to cause death, Boothby says, it could be outlawed under the Geneva convention clause entitled “prohibition of perfidy”.

Boothby also considers the implications of military advances in the use of nanotechnology, lasers, expanding bullets, “human enhancement technologies” and outer space weapons.

His warnings come at a time the MoD and military commanders are pressing the government to lift constraints imposed by both national and international human rights legislation - or “lawfare”, as the military call it.

One of the first things it is expected to do after the EU referendum (whichever way the vote goes) is to exclude the armed forces on operations abroad from Human Rights Act jurisdiction.

Serious questions about ethics and breaches of international law are already being raised - and not satisfactorily answered - by the increasing use of drones.

Both the UK and US governments want drone attacks (and, as far as the UK is concerned, special forces operations as well) shielded from public scrutiny.

Chris Cole of Drone Wars UK has warned that the line between strikes on Isis in Syria to support the Iraqi government and getting involved in the Syrian civil war is getting very blurred.

A recent US report attacked the Obama administration for lack of accountability and transparency over the use of drones.

And international law also impinges - should impinge - on Britain’s ever-closer military and security alliances with governments which have little or no regard for human rights. They include Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Turkey.

Many, of course, argue that security trumps international law -just as wider humanitarian and other interests mean that the west now has to negotiate with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and President Bashar al-Assad’s Syria.