ICRC Humanitarian Law and Policy Blog

Drones have become a defining feature of contemporary armed conflicts. Their use has surged dramatically in recent years, originally with the proliferation of inexpensive, commercially available systems, and increasingly with militaries also manufacturing drones at scale. Among these, first-person view (FPV) drones – small, agile aircraft controlled by an operator with a live video stream directly from the drone's camera – have emerged as a particularly versatile tool. Small, cheap, and easy to assemble and operate, FPV drones have reportedly been used by both state and non-state armed actors in conflicts across all regions of the world, including in Latin America, Gaza, Syria, Iran and elsewhere in West Asia, the Sahel (e.g. Mali), Sudan, Ukraine, Thailand and Cambodia, and Myanmar. In this post, ICRC Advisers Georgia Hinds, Mauro Vignati and Eirini Giorgou examine how FPV drones are reshaping the conduct of hostilities, with implications for civilians in armed conflict and for compliance with international humanitarian law (IHL). They go on to suggest practical measures that parties to armed conflict should take to address these risks and ensure respect for IHL.

Artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled targeting systems are increasingly being used in armed conflicts to process data and provide lists of military objectives. This raises a difficult question that has received little attention: Could the senior executives of the technology companies that provide these systems face criminal liability under international law when their systems contribute to serious violations of international humanitarian law? In this post, part of our Emerging Voices series, Rosa Villar Orero, PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, argues that Article 25(3)(d)(ii) of the Rome Statute, as operationalized through the Katanga test, offers a potential doctrinal avenue for establishing the criminal liability of AI targeting system providers whose contribution is made with knowledge of a group's intention to commit such crimes.

Several years after the Islamic State group lost its last territory in March 2019, tens of thousands of Syrians, Iraqis, and third-country nationals from around 60 countries – including many children – remained in camps and prisons in north-east Syria and Iraq. In early 2026, almost 6,000 detainees were transferred to Iraq, among them children who were caught up in a war they did not choose. Repatriation remains the best way forward for most of the third-country nationals – but a deeply disturbing trend concerns the exclusion of young third-country nationals who “age out” of childhood from repatriation efforts. In this post, ICRC Advisers Julia Joerin, Vanessa Murphy, and Katerina Kappos lay out why states should include young adults in repatriations as a standard practice, and call on states to reaffirm their commitment to resolving what continues to be one of the most complex and protracted child protection crises of our time.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being developed at extraordinary speed, prompting warnings from within the technology industry itself that advances may be outpacing our ability to understand and control its risks. Nowhere are the stakes higher than in armed conflict. As militaries increasingly explore the integration of AI into weapons and military decision-making, technological capability can easily be mistaken for inevitability: if a system can be built, the assumption follows that it will eventually be deployed. History suggests otherwise. States have made choices before about which technologies of warfare to prohibit, constrain or refrain from using – and they face such a choice again today. In this post, ICRC Director of International Law, Movement and Partnerships Cordula Droege argues that abstract debates about the need to address the risks of AI should not distract from a concrete and achievable task already before states: establishing legally binding rules on autonomous weapon systems (AWS), including those incorporating AI. Drawing on the realities of deploying complex technologies in the unpredictable conditions of armed conflict, she explains why technical safeguards alone cannot resolve the humanitarian, legal and ethical concerns raised when weapons select and apply force without human intervention. Ahead of the Seventh Review Conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in November, she calls on states to turn more than a decade of work into clear prohibitions and restrictions on AWS, while there is still time to decide what role machines and algorithms should play in war.

As social media and gaming platforms create new interfaces between tech-savvy children and armed actors, new questions should be asked regarding how the law prohibiting child recruitment and use in hostilities can be promoted and enforced online. In this two-part post, ICRC Advisers Vanessa Murphy, Siobhan Sparkes McNamara, and Tilman Rodenhäuser consider how the digital environment is transforming more traditional forms of child recruitment, give a rough typology of related trends in the information and communications (ICT) environment, identify the relevant international law, and propose recommendations to improve compliance with these laws in the digital age.