54 2 CHAPTER 2 3. Governance accountability gap: an institutional setting is lacking to pressure human operators and other personnel (e.g. commanders, engineers) to account for their (mediated) actions even when the human operator may have the capacity to give a meaningful account. The lacking of an institutional setting also prevents providing protection of the individuals at the lower levels of institutional decisions and omissions. In the next section we describe the link between accountability and control by following Bovens’ (2007) argument that accountability is a form of control, but not all control forms are accountability mechanisms. We characterize control based on an engineering, socio-technical and governance perspective based on the layers described by Van den Berg (2015) (see Figure 6) and briefly highlight where these perspectives fall short. Next, we move to the concept of Meaningful Human Control and argue that social institutional and design dimension at a governance level is needed, because accountability requires strong mechanisms for oversight. We look at an oversight mechanism to connect the technical, socio-technical and governance perspective of control in order to improve accountability for the behaviour of Autonomous Weapon Systems. Figure 6: Conceptualization cyberspace in layers (based on Van den Berg, 2015)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjY0ODMw