From Meaningful Human Control to Appropriate Human Judgement: Tracking the Normative Erosion of Human Oversight in the UN LAWS Debate (2017–2025)

This paper tracks the terminological shift from 'meaningful human control' (MHC) to 'appropriate human judgement and control' in the CCW/GGE rolling text (2017–2025), using corpus analysis of UNODA and RCW documents. It argues that the new formulation is formally compatible with fully autonomous targeting systems, producing a structural accountability gap under IHL.