In this piece, second year law student Samuel Cardwell draws on the knowledge he gained from participating in Goldsmiths Law’s Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights Law and Policy Clinic to examine the human rights implications of using drone strikes as part of the War on Terror.

Surveying a wide array of sources, Cardwell uses hard-facts and legal analysis to highlight the damage that drone strikes have on not just the victims but the perpetrators too.

‘Drone strikes lower the threshold for violent action and trivialise killing’, writes Cardwell. ‘The operator is distanced from the scene of the violence and only views it through pixels on a screen’, which ‘distance the emotion from them’. ‘International law must apply to drone strikes to prevent global misuse of this technology’, he concludes.

Read the blog here: The urgent need to regulate Drone Strikes.