A/HRC/23/47 19. On 25 October 2012, the Special Rapporteur participated in the weekly briefing entitled “Issue of the Moment: The Death Penalty” for the community of non-governmental organizations associated with the Department of Public Information in New York. 20. On 15 November 2012, the Special Rapporteur presented a lecture on “The Right to Life during Demonstrations” at a seminar organized by the South African Institute for Advanced Constitutional, Public, Human Rights and International Law at the Constitutional Court of South Africa in Johannesburg. On 22 and 23 November 2012, the Special Rapporteur was a panellist during the 2nd UN Inter-Agency meeting on the safety of journalists and the issue of impunity in Vienna, Austria. 21. The Special Rapporteur took part in an Expert Meeting in Geneva entitled “How Countries Abolished the Death Penalty”, organized by the International Commission against the Death Penalty on 5 February 2013, and delivered a presentation on the resumption of the death penalty. 22. On 22 February 2013, the Special Rapporteur participated in a High Level Policy Seminar organized by the European University Institute and Global Governance and Global Governance Programme on “Targeted Killing, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and EU Policy”, held at the European University Institute in Florence, where he spoke on “Targeting by Drones: Protecting the Right to Life”. 23. On 19 March 2013, the Special Rapporteur presented a keynote address at a conference on “The Ethical, Strategic and Legal Implications of Drone Warfare”, organized by the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, United States of America. 24. On 21 March 2013, the Special Rapporteur took part in the Pugwash Workshop at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, where he spoke on lethal autonomous robotics. E. Intended future areas of research 25. The Special Rapporteur will present a report on unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) to the General Assembly in 2013. III. Lethal autonomous robotics and the protection of life 26. For societies with access to it, modern technology allows increasing distance to be put between weapons users and the lethal force they project. For example, UCAVs, commonly known as drones, enable those who control lethal force not to be physically present when it is deployed, but rather to activate it while sitting behind computers in faraway places, and stay out of the line of fire. 27. Lethal autonomous robotics (LARs), if added to the arsenals of States, would add a new dimension to this distancing, in that targeting decisions could be taken by the robots themselves. In addition to being physically removed from the kinetic action, humans would also become more detached from decisions to kill – and their execution. 28. The robotics revolution has been described as the next major revolution in military affairs, on par with the introduction of gunpowder and nuclear bombs.3 But in an important respect LARs are different from these earlier revolutions: their deployment would entail not merely an upgrade of the kinds of weapons used, but also a change in the identity of those 3 Peter Singer, Wired for War (Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated, 2009), p. 179 and further,notably p. 203. 5