WHETHER THE USE OF DRONES IN A FOREIGN TERRITORY WITHOUT A DECLARATION OF WAR DOES NOT VIOLATE THE HUMAN RIGHT TO LIFE?

Abstract

The right to life is a fundamental right that each and evry one of us is born with. States, international organizations have emphasized how crucial this right is. Extreme effort has been done to put the right to life in writing and the protection of it. Rapid changes, progress of science has led states to use unmanned, autonomous machines for proliferation and later as means to eliminate targets in combat, especially drones. The use of drones for military operations offers many advantages. However, while deploying a drone to another country for target pursuit, drones governed by states go beyond the traditional notion of a conflict zone and pursue the target further into a non-conflict zone of non-belligerent state. States claim that the targets are individuals posing legal threat to the state or its civilians, however, states have their own standard or understanding of an individual posing legal threat, which leads to false identification of those who are actually posing the threat. In addition to that, we have the target pursuit and the strikes carried out resulting in civilian deaths. States are reluctant to disclose information regarding conducted drone strikes in the areas of armed conflict as well as those that have occurred in non-conflict zones, leading to lack of transparency about the drone operations. Combatant differentiation problem remains, as many of the strikes result in the deaths of civilians, due to the fact that states have taken upon themselves to minimize the international requirements for confirming a person to be a valid target for a drone strike. There is a lack of regulation regarding drone strikes and target assessment, as the issue raised by the increased use of drones in military covert operations is fairly new. Therefore, states are risking the lives of simple civilians, ordering strikes with little information about the target in the areas of a non-conflict zones, justifying drone operations as necessary means to combat terrorism. The goal of this research was to determine whether drone strikes conducted in a foreign territory without a declaration of war stays within the limits of permissible exceptions to the protection of human right to life or it goes beyond and infringes this right. To achieve this goal four tasks have been chosen: to analyse the scope of the protection of human right to life in conflict and non - conflict zones; to overview the technologies enabling the usage of drones for lethal antiterrorist operations; to research the legal problems of using drones for taking away human life; to evaluate the current framework of international law. Methods such as: analysis of scientific literature, legal sources, secondary data analysis, case study were used to help investigate whether the use of drones in a foreign territory without declaring war does not violate the human right to life.