The present contribution aspires to shed light on the complex interplay between three very topical international legal instruments regarding safeguarding measures affording protection to cultural property and cultural heritage: the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 1954 Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (‘the 1954 Convention’), the Second Protocol to the Hague Convention of 1954 for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (1999 Second Protocol),and the 1972 Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (World Heritage Convention). Through the use of appropriate examples, it further intends to demonstrate how these safeguarding measures have been utilised in practice, while bringing into relief their potential and shortcomings.

At first, I provide the definitions of the terms ‘cultural property’ and ‘cultural heritage’, as found in the above international treaties, the objective being to showcase their points of inter-section and divergence. Having defined the object of protection, I then move on to outline the required safeguarding measures that states parties to these treaties are obliged to adopt in relation to an armed conflict. In the following section, I consider the interaction between the special protection regime established by the 1954 Convention, the system of enhanced protection of the 1999 Second Protocol, and the World Heritage Convention. The underlying rationale of this inquiry is to identify the synergies and the discrepancies in this intricate web of differing protective regimes that are available to cultural property, while aiming to determine their practical utility. The last part concludes.

UNPACKING THE CONCEPTS OF CULTURAL PROPERTY AND CULTURAL HERITAGE

In the present section, I define the object of consideration, given the all-too-often confusion that the distinction between the concepts of cultural property and cultural heritage provokes. It is important to clarify at the outset that cultural property in all of its manifestations forms part of the cultural heritage of humankind. By means of comparing the two concepts under consider-ation, it has been argued that cultural property ‘looks for an owner and assesses everything from that standpoint, rather than looking to the preservation of the cultural heritage itself ‘ (Prott & O’Keefe 1992, 314).

Uncertainty and its problems

The debate concerning the law, ethics and policy of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) remains at an early stage, but one of the consistent emergent themes is that of uncertainty. Uncertainty presents itself as a problem in several different registers: first, there is the conceptual uncertainty surrounding how to define and debate the nature of autonomy in AWS. Contributions to this volume from roboticists, sociologists of science and philosophers of science demonstrate that within and without the field of computer science, no stable consensus exists concerning the meaning of autonomy or of autonomy in weapons systems. Indeed, a review of definitions invoked during a recent expert meeting convened by states parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons shows substantially different definitions in use among military experts, computer scientists and international humanitarian lawyers.

At stake in the debate over definitions are regulatory preoccupations and negotiating postures over a potential pre-emptive ban. A weapons system capable of identifying, tracking and firing on a target without human intervention, and in a manner consistent with the humanitarian law obligations of precaution, proportionality and distinction, is a fantastic ideal type. Defining AWS in such a way truncates the regulatory issues to a simple question of whether such a system is somehow inconsistent with human dignity – a question about which states, ethicists and lawyers can be expected to reasonably disagree. However, the definition formulated in this manner also begs important legal questions in respect of the design, development and deployment of AWS. Defining autonomous weapons in terms of this pure type reduces almost all questions of legality to questions of technological capacity, to which a humanitarian lawyer's response can only be: ‘If what the programmers and engineers claim is true, then … ’ The temporally prior question of whether international law generally, and international humanitarian law (IHL) in particular, prescribes any standards or processes that should be applied to the design, testing, verification and authorization of the use of AWS is not addressed. Yet these ex ante considerations are urgently in need of legal analysis and may prove to generate deeper legal problems.