This article is written by Sakshi Poojary. This article explains whether the use of armed drones in modern warfare is compatible with international law, focusing on civilian protection, the legality of strikes, and accountability for violations.
I. A Strike in Goma, and the Question It Leaves
In Goma, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, a drone attacked a residential structure earlier this year. There were European Union employees and humanitarian workers residing there. UNICEF employee Karine Buisset was murdered. In order to illustrate a specific point, a European Commissioner relayed the story in New York last month. Warfare is changed by drones. They do not change the rules that dictate how conflicts must be waged.
It is a reassuring assertion that merits investigation. A few affluent military men no longer own the weapon that murdered Buisset. Due to their affordability and accessibility,
A number of parties involved in the war in eastern Congo, including armed groups, are already using drones. Meanwhile, the law that the Commissioner cited was developed in relation to manned aircraft, artillery, and tanks. It is reasonable to wonder if it can still control a machine whose operator is hundreds of kilometers away,
behind a screen, and out of harm’s way.
Actually, there are three questions. First, is the weapon legal in and of itself?
Second, is it ever legal for a state to utilize a drone to use force on the territory of another nation,
particularly against a non-state entity? Third, does a strike adhere to the laws protecting civilians, and if it doesn’t, who is responsible? Even if a drone passes the first test with ease, it will still fail the other two.
Each of the three is discussed in turn in this article. It makes a modest but, in my opinion, convincing case. “Compatible with international law” can only refer to behavior, never hardware, since armed drones are not illegal weapons. The substantive rules are fairly established, ranging from the right to life to distinction.
The true problems are found elsewhere: in the lack of accountability mechanisms,
in disputes about the locations of armed conflict, and in secrecy.
The essay then poses the question of whether even that
The conclusion will be strained by inexpensive, mass-produced, and increasingly autonomous drones. It is based on recent research, United Nations reports, International Court of Justice rulings, and treaty text. The goal is not to support or oppose drones. It is to ascertain exactly where the law is respected and where it is violated.
II. A Lawful Weapon, an Unlawful Strike
Start with the easy part. No treaty forbids the use of armed drones. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) claims that they are neither inherently indiscriminate nor expressly forbidden.
However, their current guidelines state that they must adhere to the same regulations as any other weapon.
which include striking only combatants and military targets and taking all reasonable precautions to protect civilians. To the critical end of the discussion, scholars arrive at the same conclusion.
Although Ed. Daran and his colleagues acknowledge that drone technology is widely regarded as legal,
They argue that drone use frequently violates humanitarian law. What offends is the application.
This follows the general description of humanitarian law given by the International Court of Justice.
The court identified two fundamental objectives in its nuclear weapons ruling:
safeguard civilians by separating them from combatants and sparing combatants needless suffering. A delivery platform is a drone. A rifle’s compatibility with the law of armed conflict is never questioned. They inquire as to whether this shot was fired at this individual on this particular day. Since the regulations apply to those who organize, authorize, and carry out attacks,
states and individuals bear accountability rather than the aircraft.
None of this is altered by distance. The same responsibilities that bind a pilot in the cockpit
Also bind the person at the console, so if anything, it enhances the stakes. The setting is the subject of the difficult issues. Two gates must be cleared before the humanitarian law’s conduct regulations are applied. Was there a legitimate reason to use force in that territory? Was there a lawful basis for using force in that territory? And was there an armed conflict at all?
III. The First Gate: Force on Someone Else’s Territory
Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter forbids threatening or employing force against a state’s territorial integrity.
The two exceptions that apply here are the permission of
the Security Council and the unalienable right to self-defense found in Article 51.
The majority of drone campaigns have adopted the self-defense approach.
and a strike on foreign territory without the host state’s approval must fall under one of them.
Self-defense presupposes an armed attack, and that is where trouble starts.
In Nicaragua the Court held that the United States had breached the prohibition.
on the use of force and rejected its plea of collective self-defense. But the people drones now hunt are rarely states. In Congo v. Uganda, the Court dismissed Uganda’s self-defense claim because
The attacks by the armed group in question could not be attributed to Kinshasa.
while leaving open whether large-scale attacks by irregular forces might suffice by themselves.
After 2001 the United States and some partners filled the gap with the “unwilling or unable” formula:
If a host state cannot or will not suppress a threat, the victim state may act itself. The formula has never won general acceptance, and critics say it lets strong states discount the sovereignty of weak ones.
Pakistan, where American strikes in the tribal areas began in 2004,
protested them for years as an affront to its territorial integrity.
Corfu Channel is sometimes dragged into this argument.
There the Court spoke of every state’s obligation not to allow its territory
to be knowingly used for acts contrary to the rights of other states. Ed. Daran and his co-authors read that as a duty of care resting on the state that fires the missile. It is a creative reading. The orthodox one points the other way.
at the territorial state, and that is exactly what the “unwilling or unable” camp leans on. Yet the case cuts against them too. Britain’s minesweeping in Albanian waters, done without consent after the explosions, was itself held to violate Albanian sovereignty. A victim state’s grievance, however real, did not buy it a license to enter uninvited.
Two complications remain. One is secrecy.
In May 2013 President Obama acknowledged “lethal,
targeted action” by remotely piloted aircraft and called it both effective and legal,
But as Jaume Saura observed, opacity about the frequency and scope of the program stayed the policy.
The other is that, unlike humanitarian-law versions, self-defense has its own necessity and proportionality restrictions.
limiting force to what is required to repel the attack. If the threat’s imminence is never clarified, a claim of self-defense cannot be evaluated.
IV. The Second Gate: Is There an Armed Conflict?
Humanitarian law applies only in armed conflict. For conflicts between a state and an organized armed group,
The classic test comes from the Yugoslavia Tribunal’s Tadić decision:
protracted armed violence between governmental authorities and organized armed groups, or between such groups. The ICRC has long insisted that violence must reach that level before the law of war takes over.
Al-Qaeda and its affiliates are involved in a global, non-international military combat, according to Washington and some of its allies.
Since such wars have historically required recognized parties and a recognizable location,
Bukhari and his co-authors contend that this pushes the idea beyond its historical context. Strikes in Afghanistan fit the model easily. Strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, where violence is sporadic or the host state is not a party, fit badly.
Ed.daran and colleagues add a policy wrinkle:
They report that the Trump administration dropped the designation of “areas of active hostilities.,
“which, in their view, lowered the threshold for tolerating civilian casualties,
and that at least 131 strikes were recorded in Yemen in 2017 alone.
Why does the label matter? Because the toolkit changes with it. Inside an armed conflict, killing a combatant is lawful. Outside one, human rights law governs, and lethal force is a last resort against an imminent threat to life. The ICRC has said that a suspected militant far from any battlefield is not a legitimate target.
under the laws of war. The 2011 killing in Yemen of Anwar al-Awlaki,
An American citizen accused of leading al-Qaeda’s affiliate there shows how sharp the point is. His son died in a strike two weeks later. Whether either death was lawful depends almost entirely
on whether one accepts that a war was under way in that place.
V. The Third Gate: Distinction, Proportionality, Precaution
Parties must always distinguish between fighters and civilians and direct their efforts only toward military goals. Attacks that are likely to cause unintentional civilian casualties
that are out of proportion to the intended direct and tangible military advantage are prohibited. In order to confirm targets and minimize damage, attackers must also take all reasonable precautions.
The argument for drones is strongest in this situation, and it is not insignificant.
A loitering aircraft may monitor a compound for days
tracking who comes and goes, and waiting for a moment when no people are present. Butro and his co-authors report that operators sometimes watch a target for days,
develop a kind of familiarity with the person, and show anxiety and depression after a lethal strike,
and they find no empirical support for the picture of the trigger-happy operator. The ICRC, for its part, concedes that whether drones deliver such advantages depends on the circumstances.
But precision belongs to the missile. Legality belongs to the choice of target Everything depends on the intelligence behind
the aim since a weapon that lands precisely where it is directed kills the person standing there. Pattern-of-life analysis and signal tracking can misidentify, and “signature strikes,
” which target people whose behavior fits a profile rather than those whose identities are known,
run the risk of gaining combatant status without adequate verification. Reports from 2012 state that,
unless they were proven innocent, the US government regarded all men of military age in a strike zone as fighters. A obligation to confirm beforehand conflicts with a presumption of guilt given after death.
Two recent theatres show the failure mode. In Gaza, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has documented growing use of quadcopters against civilians,
including the reported shooting of a man carrying a white flag. Those are advocacy findings, not judicial ones, and should be read that way. In Kherson Province the picture is starker and better evidenced.
In May 2025 the UN-mandated Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine concluded that
Russian forces had killed nearly 150 civilians in Kherson city and sixteen other localities through drone attacks,
and found the war crime of intentionally attacking civilians and the crime against humanity of murder,
carried out under an organisational policy. Many of the drones were modified commercial models. The Commission also looked at allegations of Ukrainian drone attacks
on civilians and could not corroborate them, for want of access.
Kherson matters because nobody can plead uncertainty about applicable law. It is an international armed conflict, and the rules were plain. The drone supplied no excuse. It supplied reach, and apparently an audience.
VI. Rights, Courts and the Accountability Gap
Human rights law runs alongside. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights’ Article 6 forbids the arbitrary taking of human life. . Some states say humanitarian law alone governs their overseas strikes, but the Court has resisted so clean a split. In the Wall opinion it held that the Covenant applies to acts a state performs outside its territory
when it exercises jurisdiction there, and the Human Rights Committee has since taken a broad view of the Covenant’s reach.
How far a strike puts its victim within the striker’s “jurisdiction” is still argued over.
Targeting criteria and fatality statistics, the United Nations Special Rapporteurs on extrajudicial executions,
Philip Alston and then Christof Heyns, pushed states to release their legal grounds. They were more upset that no one outside the program could tell than that drones are unlawful. That seems to be the main issue. The rule of proportionality depends on the facts. Only the attacker has the information needed to balance military advantage against civilian casualties. The regulation becomes a promise rather than a norm if those are never removed from a classified file.
For the most part, courts have not filled the voidIn Al-Aulaqi v. Obama, a federal judge in Washington
denied a father’s request to halt his son’s targeting on the grounds of standing and political question. In 2013, the Peshawar High Court took a different stance,
declaring that the American strikes in the tribal areas were illegal and advising the government to take the issue to
the UN and the International Criminal Court (ICC). But as Bukhari and his co-authors point out, these decisions have rarely been upheld and depend on political will. On paper, the Rome Statute covers the field. It criminalises intentionally attacking civilians and attacks expected to cause clearly excessive incidental harm,
and Article 28 reaches commanders who fail to prevent or punish. In practice the United States is not a party, which limits the Court’s reach over its campaigns. Ukraine, also a non-party, has accepted the Court’s jurisdiction,
which at least keeps a door open for strikes on its territory. State responsibility offers a second route. A state that commits a wrongful act owes full reparation, but Bukhari and colleagues observe
that most victims of drone strikes have received neither remedy nor official acknowledgement.
VII. Cheap, Many and Learning to Think
Everything so far assumes a state with a chain of command and a legal adviser. That assumption is fraying. The Commissioner’s warning from Goma was exactly this: drones are cheap,
easy to get and spreading, with armed groups among their users. Non-state armed groups are also bound by humanitarian law, and she stressed
that all parties—state and non-state—hear the same message. However, the enforcement mechanisms were designed with states in mind, and if access is limited, there is little proof. Her second demand deserves attention for that reason: document what happens, monitor compliance, insist on accountability.
Then there is autonomy. Butro and colleagues describe swarms in which each drone
reacts to its surroundings and works with the others with or without direct human oversight,
and in which the loss of several units to jamming does not stop the rest from overwhelming a defence. They offer a simple answer to who decides on life and death,
which is that a human pilot enters commands, and a harder one,
which is that software increasingly flies and may soon select.
The Group of Governmental Experts under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons has endorsed guiding principles:
humanitarian law applies fully to all weapons systems, autonomous ones included,
and human responsibility for the use of force cannot be transferred to machines. Guiding principles are not binding rules. Bukhari and his co-authors would bar purely autonomous targeting that operates without meaningful human control.
VIII. Where Reform Should Aim
Butro and Bukhari both call for a new treaty or code of conduct. A comprehensive treaty looks improbable, and Ed.daran and colleagues warn that expanding jurisdiction
carelessly could reduce accountability in the very regions most affected. Modest steps are likelier to work, and I suspect they matter more. Four seem worth pursuing.
First, disclosure. States that use armed drones should say publicly which legal basis they rely on,
which armed conflict they consider themselves party to, and how they assess civilian harm afterwards. This is what the Special Rapporteurs asked for,
and the Human Rights Council has urged compliance with precaution, distinction and proportionality in counter-terrorism drone use. Second, independent investigation and reparation. Bukhari and colleagues propose a United Nations inquiry
body on the model of the Myanmar fact-finding mission,
and the Kherson findings show what a body like that can do. Third, states should state their positions on contested law. “Unwilling or unable” and the geographic reach of armed conflict are matters of custom,
and custom is made by what states say and do. Silence lets a contested reading harden by default. Fourth, a firm rule that target selection never passes entirely to a machine.
IX. Conclusion
So, are drones in modern warfare compatible with international law? As weapons, yes. As practised, sometimes, and the sometimes is the whole story. The weapon is lawful.
The gate of force is contested, and whether a given strike clears it depends on consent,
Security Council approval, or a theory of self-defence that states do not share. The conduct rules apply fully, and the clearest violations, as in Kherson, come from intent rather than technology. What is missing is the machinery that turns rules into consequences.
The practical stakes are not abstract. They are aid workers in a Goma residence,
farmers in a market, families in a camp who need to know
that where they sleep will not be a target. If drones keep spreading and learning, the law’s weakest link, accountability, will be tested hardest.
That points to future research on measuring civilian harm from remote strikes,
on how states form and signal custom in this field, and on what “meaningful human control”
should mean in operational terms.
A screen can put a thousand kilometres between an operator and a target. The law was never written to measure that distance. It was written to measure what happens at the other end of it.
