Ben Emmerson wants to be clear: He's not out to ban flying killer robots used by the CIA or the U.S. military. But the 49-year-old British lawyer is about to become the bane of the drones' existence, thanks to the United Nations inquiry he launched last week into their deadly operations.
Emmerson, the United Nations' special rapporteur for human rights and counterterrorism, will spend the next five months doing something the Obama administration has thoroughly resisted: unearthing the dirty secrets of a global counterterrorism campaign that largely relies on rapidly proliferating drone technology. Announced on Thursday in London, it's the first international inquiry into the drone program, and one that carries the imprimatur of the world body. By the next session of the United Nations in the fall, Emmerson hopes to provide the General Assembly with an report on 25 drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Palestine where civilian deaths are credibly alleged.
That carries the possibility of a reckoning with the human damage left by drones, the first such witnessing by the international community. Accountability, Emmerson tells Danger Room in a Monday phone interview, 'is the central purpose of the report.' He's not shying away from the possibility of digging up evidence of 'war crimes,' should the facts point in that direction. But despite the Obama administration's secrecy about the drone strikes to date, he's optimistic that the world's foremost users of lethal drone tech will cooperate with him.
In conversation, Emmerson, who's served as special rapporteur since 2011, doesn't sound like a drone opponent or a drone skeptic. He sounds more like a drone realist. 'Let's face it, they're here to stay,' he says, shortly after pausing to charge his cellphone during a trip to New York to prep for his inquiry. 'This technology, as I say, is a reality. It is cheap, both in economic terms and in the risk to the lives of the service personnel who are from the sending state.
'And for that reason there are real concerns that because it is so cheap, it can be used with a degree of frequency that other, more risk-based forms of engagement like fixed-wing manned aircraft or helicopters are not,' Emmerson says. 'And the result is there's a perception of the frequency and intensity with which this technology is used is exponentially different, and as a result, there is necessarily a correspondingly greater risk of civilian casualties.'
Emmerson has zeroed in on the most heated debate about the drones, a subject around which there is little consensus and fewer facts, thanks to government secrecy. Do the drones kill fewer people than other methods of warfare? Or does their seeming ease of use make warfare easier to proliferate, and therefore kill more people ' terrorist and innocent ' than they otherwise would? There are several independent studies, mostly relying on uncertain local media reports from the dangerous places the drones overfly, and no agreement.
'When I think about the covert drones program, we're focused on the civilian impact,' says Sarah Holewinski of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, which has studied the program. 'But nobody really knows! The president doesn't know, I don't know, human rights groups don't know. They're taking place in remote areas. I'm looking forward to knowing from this inquiry what actually happens when a drone strike occurs.'
Enter Emmerson. From now until May, his team will explore 25 drone strikes in the Mideast and South Asia and examine the 'safeguards' that the three countries known to have used the lethal technology ' the U.S., U.K., and Israel ' place around the strikes. It won't settle the debate. But it will provide a deeper pool of data with which to inform it.
'The territories in which these technologies have been used thus far have typically been areas where there's a densely populated civilian community living in poorly constructed buildings that collapse very easily, often like a pack of cards or dominoes,' Emmerson says. 'And [they] cause damage beyond that, which would be the intended consequence or the anticipated consequence. Are those incidents resulting in [internal] investigation? Has any individual or any entity been held accountable? Have lessons been learned? Do these problems continue? Do they [subside], do they carry on or increase? These are the sorts of questions that we'll be trying to look at as best we can.'
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