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by Manfred Kohler
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The Regulatory Institute has developed a draft Convention on Existential Risks. You are kindly invited:

- to comment on the preliminary draft by mail to manager@regulatoryinstitute.org.

- to launch a lobby initiative in favour of such a convention, or 

- to create a dedicated organisation lobbying in favour of such a convention.

Here are a few reasons why such a convention would be helpful and better suited to address existential risks than the current patchwork of conventions dealing with different types of ordinary risks:

  • With today's rapidly evolving technologies, new existential risks can emerge at any time, while negotiations for conventions take many years. A generic existential risk convention would prepare us for any newly emerging existential risk. The risk of coming too late with a new risk-specific convention would be avoided.
  • To increase efficiency, mechanisms for existential risks should be harmonised across sectors, and such harmonisation can hardly be achieved via different international public law instruments.
  • There might be scenarios of borderline and combined existential risks that do not clearly fall under one or the other ordinary risk convention or other instrument.
  • International agreements dealing with risks take as a basis normal risks and not those that threaten the existence of humankind. Accordingly, the agreements are strongly based on the right of sovereignty and in particular territorial integrity of states. Very invasive international measures are therefore not permitted and existential risks are thus not appropriately addressed. States might be more ready to give up state sovereignty for an existential risks convention than for ordinary global risk conventions, as we will see in the following. If so, existential risks could be better addressed by a dedicated existential risks convention because more invasive measures could be accepted in the context of existential risks than in the context of an ordinary international agreement.
  • A dedicated Existential Risks Convention could better cover inhabited areas that are de facto outside any state control. There are areas on earth that formally belong to a state, but de facto are outside any kind of control by a recognised state. Furthermore, more than half of the globe’s surface is outside any state control for at sea outside the zones claimed by states. Laboratories on vessels under the flag of a weak state navigating on the high sea or platforms erected in international shallow waters can operate without any effective state control, whilst modern gene-editing methods (CRISPR-Cas) do not require large facilities. Hence, surveillance needs to be established for the oceans as well.

Please have a look at the draft Convention on Existential Risks to check the possible content of such a convention.

Please share this post with others who might be interested in giving a follow-up to it, namely by lobbying in favour of such a convention. [The Regulatory Institute is not in a position to take over that role.]

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