The Impact of Technology on Public

International Law
I. INTRODUCTION
We are now in the 21st century wherein we can see how the world
changes so fast. It has become more linked and people, information, and
resources can cross boundaries like never before. From technological
advances to emerging environmental issues, we are now forced to confront
new scenarios in the international facet. Its like saying that the future is
NOW. We need to go with the flow in order to survive. Innovation is
becoming necessary for survival.

Nowadays, we can determine which countries are developed,

developing, and undeveloped by looking into their innovations, how their
country are manned, how they confront emerging issues on political,
environmental, and economic aspects. Truly, technology is bringing great
impact in globalization.

Globalization can be defined as the process of change, increasing

interconnectedness and interdependence among countries and economies,
bringing the world closer through better world-wide communication,
transport and trade links. This process is changing the world dramatically
and quickly, affecting economic, social, political and cultural aspects of life
and bringing both opportunities and challenges.

What is unique is the emergence of a modern form of globalization in recent

decades, aided by the pace and scope of global integration resulting from
unmatched advancements and reduction in the cost of technology,
communications, science, transport and industry.

Markets have become more interwoven and the production process has been
made more efficient by the option to create world products, i.e. products
whose components are made in different locations around the world. Also,
the ability to ship information and products easily and cheaply from one
country to the next and to locate the manufacturing process where labour
and work processes are less expensive has changed the pattern of
production and consumption across the world.
Improved technology in transportation and telecommunications the
cost of how people communicate and travel has drastically reduced in the
last few decades, from cheaper air travel and high-speed rail to the rapid
growth of the internet and mobile phones.

Movement of people and capital increasing numbers of people are now

able to move in search of a new home, job, or to escape danger in their own
country. Money is being moved globally through electronic transfer systems.
Developing countries are becoming a more common place for international
investment due to the huge potential for growth. The lowering of trade
barriers since the Second World War has been a major factor in the growth of
world trade. The World Trade Organisation (WTO), formerly the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, has been responsible for negotiating
reductions in tariffs and other barriers to trade in rounds of talks, the most
recent of which was the Doha round.

Rise of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) as global awareness

of certain issues has risen, so has the number of organisations that aim to
deal with them. Many of these issues are not constrained by country
boundaries, e.g. climate change.

Transnational Corporations (TNCs) accessing new markets across the

world which are opening up in developing countries. Businesses are also
encouraged to source workers globally, as some jobs can be done by foreign
workers for a much lower cost than domestic workers, such as
manufacturing jobs.1

1 (Royal Geographical Society)Royal Geographical Society. (n.d.). 21st Century

Challenges. Globalization and Geopolitics.
 Technology has become an important issue in almost every area of
international law. International trade treaties are increasingly focused on
questions of data flows, privacy, and digital products and services. The
emergence of cyberspace poses special challenges to traditional conceptions
of both civil and criminal jurisdiction. The laws of war must grapple with the
development of warfare through drones and the difficulty of identifying state
action in the online realm. International environmental law faces advances in
nanotechnology, deep seabed mining, space technologies, and even the
possibility of geo-engineering.

Technology also plays an important role in human rights and

humanitarian law, ranging from the use of mobile phones for delivering
health services to mapping human rights abuses or disaster response. The
intersection of technology and international law also poses a range of
important challenges in the area of international governance and regime
design.
There is much to be gained from a cross-disciplinary discussion about the
opportunities and challenges of technology for each of these areas of
international law.

II. DISCUSSIONS

One of the most essential technological innovations is the INTERNET .

Information technologies always affect international diplomacy. The
telegraph changed the way wars were fought and the relations between
diplomats and heads of state. Wireless telegraphy (radio) had similar
profound impacts. Radio broadcasting in the 1930s helped bring the
totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Mussolini to power. Television is credited for
shaping American withdrawal from Vietnam and for encouraging
international intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo.
 But the Internet is different. For one thing, it is inherently
global. Anyone can set up a Web page on a $2,000 computer, connect the
computer to the Internet for $12.95 a month, and publish pages instantly
visible everywhere in the world to anyone else who has connected a
computer to the Internet. That kind of global reach is not true with Morse
telegraphy, wireless radio communication, television or radio broadcasting.
Users of older information technologies had to make special arrangements to
extend their reach far across national boundaries. Users of the Internet must
make special arrangements to localize their activities.

The Internet has another important characteristic that distinguishes it

from earlier information technologies. The price of entry is a
$2,000 computer. That is all one needs to broadcast to the world through
the Internet or to participate in political dialogue. That is several orders of
magnitude less that it costs to set up bricks-and-mortar store, a television
broadcast transmitter, or to buy a printing press to publish a newspaper.

These remarkably lower economic barriers to entry for the Internet,

compared with older information technologies, empower disfavored groups
within domestic political arenas; it empowers groups who want to form
connections with each other across national boundaries; it empowers people
who want to create or maintain NGOs.

The following are some of the effects of internet to Public International

Law:

A. The Internet facilitates the development of new public

international law
The Internet facilitates development of new public international
law in two ways. First, it reduces the transaction costs and speeds
up the process of negotiating new treaties. This effect is evident
mostly in the preparatory work that precedes formal adoption of
treaty language. Second, the Internet empowers groups advocating
new treaty lawprimarily NGOs, making it easier for them to form
bonds across state boundaries and to participate in the preparatory
work for treaties even though they lack substantial resources.
The Internets lower economic barriers to entry give voice to
political actors who otherwise would be denied effective access to
the public arena. Because the Internet gives them access, and is
inherently global, they can find likeminded people in other states,
thus enabling them to build political movements across national
lines. Once they have built movements, the Internet makes it easier
for them to mobilize public opinion, thus altering the position of
state actors.
 B. The Internet promotes acceptance of public international
law by states
The Internet promotes national adoption of new public
international law by empowering national interest groups who
advocate ratification of new treaties. This is one aspect of the
interpenetration process. (The other aspect involves the adoption
of international norms as domestic legislation is framed and
international and domestic cases are decided by courts. The
Internet also facilitates these post ratification aspects of
interpenetration.)

C. The Internet aids in detecting violations and mobilizing

sanctions
The Internet encourages compliance with public international law
by making it easier to detect violations and deviations, and to
mobilize sanctions. More and more institutions concerned with
implementation of treaties are using the Internet to publicize
national decisions taken under treaties.
The growing importance of the Internet as a political and legal
forum and as a marketplace creates leverage for use against
violators of international norms.

Considering the forgoing effects, technology, on its own, never affects

revolution. It is people, using technology for certain purposes, who alter
international law. They must be able to use the Internet to publish law and
law reform proposals; they must be able to find the law; and they must be
able to engage in political dialogue on the Internet. The Internets
characteristics are changing the political dynamics of international law
formation and enforcement, changes likely to increase the influence of the
international legal system.2

Aside from technological advances on communication, new weapon

technologies also emerged. A lot of people are speculating that warfare
nowadays is not done in the usual battlefield. There are threats of biological
weapons and the rampant cyber warfare. At this point, we need to deal with
International Humanitarian Law and weapon technologies.

2 Henry H. Perritt, J. (n.d.). The Internet is Changing the Public International Legal System.
Retrieved 2016, from http://www.kentlaw.edu/cyberlaw/perrittnetchg.htm
International humanitarian law has developed over the centuries to limit
the adverse effects of armed conflict for humanitarian reasons. A core rule of
international humanitarian law underlying the development, procurement
and use of all weapons is that parties to an armed conflict do not have an
unlimited choice of methods and means of warfare. All weapons must be
used and indeed must be capable of being used in accordance with
international humanitarian laws general limitations on the conduct of
hostilities, notably the rules aimed at protecting civilians from direct or
indiscriminate attacks and otherwise sparing them as far as possible the
effects of the hostilities, and the rules aimed at protecting combatants from
superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering. In fact, all new weapons require
assessment and legal review before they are developed, acquired and
introduced by the military to ensure that they are compatible with these core
rules and thus to prevent the use of weapons that would violate international
law.

In addition, certain weapons are subject to specific prohibitions or

restrictions agreed by States in international treaties, due to their inherently
indiscriminate or abhorrent effects. Some of these prohibitions or restrictions
are very long standing. For example deliberate poisoning has long provoked
public abhorrence and even ancient civilizations banned poisoning in
warfare. In 1899 countries met in The Hague to prohibit poison or poisoned
arms.

After the First World War, with vivid images of the horrors of chemical
warfare fresh in their minds, this was reinforced with a prohibition on the use
of chemical and biological weapons. When agreeing the Geneva Protocol in
1925 countries noted that the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or
other gases, and of all analogous liquids materials or devices, has been justly
condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world.

Further strengthening of these prohibitions occurred in 1972 with the

agreement of the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention and in 1993 with
the establishment of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Other international prohibitions that have been in existence for many

years included those agreed by States to ban exploding bullets (1868) and
expanding bullets (1899). In recent years, countries have continued to
develop new laws to prohibit or restrict weapons that have particularly
adverse consequences for civilians including anti-personnel mines (1997)
and cluster munitions (2008). States have also prohibited the use of
weapons which have been deemed to be excessively injurious or to have
indiscriminate effects, including blinding laser weapons (1998). 3

Informed by these fundamental general prohibitions, international

humanitarian law was designed to be flexible enough to adapt to
technological developments, including those that could never have been
anticipated at the time. There can be no doubt that international
humanitarian law applies to new weaponry and to all new technology used in
warfare. This is explicitly recognized in article 36 of Additional Protocol I,
according to which, in the study, development or adoption of a new weapon
or method of warfare, states parties are under an obligation to determine
whether their employment would, in some or all circumstances, be prohibited
by international law applicable to them.

Nonetheless, applying pre-existing legal rules to a new technology

raises the question of whether the rules are sufficiently clear in light of the
technology's specific and perhaps unprecedented - characteristics, as well
as with regard to the foreseeable humanitarian impact it may have. In
certain circumstances, States will choose or have chosen to adopt more
specific regulations.

Today, we live in the age of information technology and we are seeing

this technology being used on the battlefield. This is not entirely new but the
multiplication of new weapons or methods of warfare that rely on such
technology seems exponential. The same advances in information
technology that enable us to have live video chat on our mobile phones also
make it possible to build smaller, less expensive, and more versatile drones.
The same technology used for remote controls of home air conditioning units
also makes it possible to turn off the lights in a city on the other side of the
globe.

Lets take a closer look to some of the technologies that have only
recently entered the battlefield or could potentially enter it. These are, in

3 (Davidson, 2012)Davidson, N. (2012, Dec). Retrieved 2016, from Intercross:

http://intercrossblog.icrc.org/blog/how-international-law-adapts-to-new-
weapons-and-technologies-of-warfare
particular cyber technology, remote-controlled weapon systems, and robotic
weapon systems.

A. Cyber warfare
From certain cyber operations that have occurred, we know that
one party to a conflict can potentially "attack" another party's
computer systems, for instance by infiltrating or manipulating it.
Thus, the cyber infrastructure on which the enemy's military relies
can be damaged, disrupted or destroyed. However, civilian
infrastructure might also be hit either because it is being directly
targeted or because it is incidentally damaged or destroyed when
military infrastructure is targeted.
So far, we do not know precisely what the humanitarian
consequences of cyber warfare could be. It appears that technically,
cyber-attacks against airport control and other transportation
systems, dams or nuclear power plants are possible. Such attacks
would most likely have large-scale humanitarian consequences.
They could result in significant civilian casualties and damages. Of
course, for the time being it is difficult to assess how likely cyber-
attacks of such gravity really are, but we cannot afford to wait until
it is too late to prevent worst-case scenarios.

From a humanitarian perspective, the main challenge about

cyber operations in warfare is that cyberspace is characterized by
interconnectivity and thus by the difficulty to limit the effects of
such operations to military computer systems. While some military
computer infrastructure is certainly secured and separated from
civilian infrastructure, a lot of military infrastructure relies on civilian
computers or computer networks. Under such conditions, how can
the attacker foresee the repercussions of his attack on civilian
computer systems? Very possibly, the computer system or
connection that the military relies on is the same as the one on
which the hospital nearby or the water network relies.

Another difficulty in applying the rules of international

humanitarian law to cyberspace stems from the digitalisation on
which cyberspace is built. Digitalisation ensures anonymity and thus
complicates the attribution of conduct. Thus, in most cases, it
appears that it is difficult if not impossible to identify the author of
an attack. Since IHL relies on the attribution of responsibility to
individuals and parties to conflicts, major difficulties arise. In
 particular, if the perpetrator of a given operation and thus the link
of the operation to an armed conflict cannot be identified, it is
extremely difficult to determine whether IHL is even applicable to
the operation.

B. remote-controlled weapon systems

Remote controlled weapon systems are a further step in a long-
standing strategic continuum to move soldiers farther and farther
away from their adversaries and the actual combat zone.
Drones or "unmanned aerial vehicles" are the most conspicuous
example of such new technologies, armed or unarmed. Their
number has increased exponentially over the last few years.
Similarly, so-called unmanned ground vehicles are increasingly
deployed on the battlefield. They range from robots to detect and
destroy roadside bombs to those that inspect vehicles at
approaching checkpoints.
One of the main arguments to invest in such new technologies is
that they save lives of soldiers. Another argument is that drones, in
particular, have also enhanced real-time aerial surveillance
possibilities, thereby allowing belligerents to carry out their attacks
more precisely against military objectives and thus reduce civilian
casualties and damage to civilian objects in other words to
exercise greater precaution in attack.

There could be some concern, however, on how and by whom

these systems are operated. Firstly, they are sometimes operated
by civilians, including employees of private companies, which raises
a question about the status and protection of these operators; and
questions about whether their training and accountability is
sufficient in light of the life and death decisions that they make.
Secondly, studies have shown that disconnecting a person,
especially by means of distance (be it physical or emotional) from a
potential adversary makes targeting easier and abuses more likely.
The military historian John Keegan has called this the
"impersonalization of battle".

C. robotic weapon systems

Automated weapon systems robots in common parlance
go a step further than remote-controlled systems. They are not
remotely controlled but function in a self-contained and
independent manner once deployed. Examples of such systems
 include automated sentry guns, sensor-fused munitions and
certain anti-vehicle landmines. Although deployed by humans,
such systems will independently verify or detect a particular type
of target object and then fire or detonate. An automated sentry
gun, for instance, may fire, or not, following voice verification of
a potential intruder based on a password.

The central challenge with automated systems is to ensure

that they are indeed capable of the level of discrimination
required by IHL. The capacity to discriminate, as required by IHL,
will depend entirely on the quality and variety of sensors and
programming employed within the system. Up to now, it is
unclear how such systems would differentiate a civilian from a
combatant or a wounded or incapacitated combatant from an
able combatant. Also, it is not clear how these weapons could
assess the incidental loss of civilian lives, injury to civilians or
damage to civilian objects, and comply with the principle of
proportionality.

An even further step would consist in the deployment of

autonomous weapon systems, that is weapon systems that can
learn or adapt their functioning in response to changing
circumstances. A truly autonomous system would have artificial
intelligence that would have to be capable of implementing IHL.
While there is considerable interest and funding for research in
this area, such systems have not yet been weaponised. Their
development represents a monumental programming challenge
that may well prove impossible. The deployment of such systems
would reflect a paradigm shift and a major qualitative change in
the conduct of hostilities. It would also raise a range of
fundamental legal, ethical and societal issues which need to be
considered before such systems are developed or deployed. A
robot could be programmed to behave more ethically and far
more cautiously on the battlefield than a human being. But what
if it is technically impossible to reliably program an autonomous
weapon system so as to ensure that it functions in accordance
with IHL under battlefield conditions?

When we discuss these new technologies, let us also look at their

possible advantages in contributing to greater protection. Respect for the
principles of distinction and proportionality means that certain precautions in
attack, provided for in article 57 of Additional Protocol I, must be taken. This
includes the obligation of an attacker to take all feasible precautions in the
choice of means and methods of attack with a view to avoiding, and in any
event to minimizing, incidental civilian casualties and damages. In certain
cases cyber operations or the deployment of remote-controlled weapons or
robots might cause fewer incidental civilian casualties and less incidental
civilian damage compared to the use of conventional weapons. Greater
precautions might also be feasible in practice, simply because these
weapons are deployed from a safe distance, often with time to choose one's
target carefully and to choose the moment of attack in order to minimize
civilian casualties and damage. It may be argued that in such circumstances
this rule would require that a commander consider whether he or she can
achieve the same military advantage by using such means and methods of
warfare, if practicable.4

4 (Dr. Jakob Kellenberger, 2011)Dr. Jakob Kellenberger, P. I. (2011).

International Committee of the red cross. Retrieved 2016, from
https://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/statement/new-weapon-
technologies-statement-2011-09-08.htm