"A new departure": Britain's lethal drone policy and the range of justice

Abstract

In Chapter 6 (Britain’s Lethal Drone Policy and the Range of Justice), Christopher Fuller follows Enemark in problematizing the assignment of drone violence to the war paradigm, shifting the discussion toward UK experience. The chapter specifically assesses Prime Minister David Cameron’s 2015 authorisation of the drone-based targeted killing of Reyaad Khan, a British citizen and member of Islamic State. This attack, in Syria, was the first known instance of a British drone being used lethally inside a country in which the UK is not involved in a war. Accordingly, Cameron described the strike as “a new departure” for the UK when revealing the government’s new drone policy and its adoption of the US government’s controversial interpretation of international law for ‘war on terror’ purposes. While never openly opposing the US decision to regard acts of terrorism and counterterrorism responses through a war paradigm, the British government had, until this strike, treated terrorism as a criminal activity, with responsibility for countering the threat falling to civilian security services. Fuller’s chapter provides an ethical assessment of the way in which the UK government has remained vague about the purpose of its post-2015 drone policy, the legal basis which underwrites it, the associated decision-making process, and the accountability mechanisms which exist for strikes. In the absence of a detailed memorandum on the UK government’s formal policy position, he explores the evolution of the UK’s armed drone fleet, ministers’ statements, and government policy documents in an effort to reveal the ethos which has driven the government’s adoption of lethal drones for counterterrorism. In doing so, Fuller argues that Britain’s drone policy is the product of a particular and morally problematic attitude toward sovereignty, borders, national security, and concepts of justice.

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