The EU and armed drones – epilogue
The countries of the European Union are moving into the era of weaponized drones. While the United Kingdom remains the only EU country to deploy armed drones, several other EU member states are seeking to acquire weapons-equipped unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or are debating their acquisition. Many European countries are also now involved in projects to develop weapons-capable drones themselves, though it is expected that European-made drones will not be ready for deployment for at least 10 years. Nevertheless, despite these developments and despite the extensive use of armed drones by the United States, the EU has not yet adopted any collective public position on some of the most hotly debated issues associated with the use of UAVs. Even individual member states have been slow to expound clear positions on the legal parameters for drone strikes. From one perspective, it might be thought odd that the development of a new weapons platform should give rise to demands for a defined European position. Admittedly, the acquisition of armed UAVs raises some questions for military forces that are different from those associated with other weapons systems: their combination of targeting precision, ability to remain over the battlespace for an extended period and elimination of any physical risk to the forces operating them are qualitatively different from other available military technologies and change the nature of the military engagement with the enemy. However the most striking feature of the global debate about drones has been the degree to which it has come to revolve around the way the United States has used UAVs to target suspected terrorists outside of battlefield conditions as part of its global campaign against al-Qaeda and associated groups. Calls for the EU to adopt a position on drones can most often be reduced to a request for clarification of the European view on the legality and morality of targeted killing conducted against individuals who do not pose an immediate threat to the forces attacking them. US practice in this area has gone beyond the boundaries that most western countries previously regarded as defining the limits of legitimate use of force. There are several reasons why it would be desirable for the EU to adopt a clearer line on this question. Bruno Oliveira Martins and Benedikt Backhaus (2015) highlight what is perhaps the most important one: given Europe’s long-standing role in helping define international norms, it would be regrettable for the EU not to participate in establishing the correct standards for a practice that could, under the legal regime asserted by the United States, cause significant damage to the international rule of law. As Elisabeth Schweiger (2015) argues, European silence should not necessarily be read as consent, but the
Killing by metadata: Europe and the surveillance–targeted killing nexus
The attempt to propose a European perspective on targeted killings is problematic to the extent that implies an understanding thereof as an exclusively American practice. By doing so, it risks overlooking the intimate relation of drone warfare with a targeting regime that depends for its functioning upon a surveillant assemblage transcending the American/European distinction. This article understands “Europe” as a fundamental part in the US targeting killing programme. Rather than exceptional and episodic, indeed, the European participation in drone strikes represents a continuation of a practice of intelligence sharing that, originating as a Second World War UK–US agreement, nowadays encompasses an assemblage of countries that collect and share military intelligence with one another. This increasing ability to collect, circulate and analyse a vast amount of data has underwritten the emergence of a distinct “way of war” revolving around the tracking and killing of individuals worldwide. The category of “Europe”, the article concludes, is unable to make sense of these phenomena.
Toward a Drone Accountability Regime
From a moral standpoint, lethal drones are intrinsically no worse as a means of warfare than bombing or sending commandos to kill enemies. From the perspective of their users, they have six major advantages over more conventional weapons: they are often cheaper; their use can be more readily concealed; they allow for more precise targeting, with the potential for less “collateral damage”; their use can involve less serious infringements of sovereignty than invasion by troops; and they may be less likely to provoke widespread hostile reactions by the population of the country in which they are used than military operations involving troops on the ground. But these advantages generate three major risks: of violating sovereignty, of over-using the military option, and of making it more difficult to identify violations of constraints against targeting noncombatants. To deal with these risks, a Drone Accountability Regime is needed that imposes obligations on states, which in turn would be required to impose them on their agents. Since it would be infeasible to negotiate a treaty-based legal regime at present and for the foreseeable future, the Drone Accountability Regime should be informal and should involve transnational actors as well as states. Its key principle should be transparency, helping enable civil society to hold states accountable, and its central agent would be an Ombudsperson with broad authority to investigate situations and publicize her findings. No institution can ensure that states, or operators, are held fully accountable to appropriate standards of conduct, but such a regime could increase the degree of accountability for the use of lethal drones.