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Vicious humans could use killer robots to carry out barbaric war crimes before walking away without taking any blame.

That's the shock warning from Human Rights Watch, which has renewed its call for a ban on autonomous robotic killing machines.

Activists from this famous rights group will speak at a UN meeting in Geneva next week to persuade politicans to outlaw killer robots.

It has also published a report called “Mind the Gap: The Lack of Accountability for Killer Robots” which sets out why robots could end up doing humans' dirty work.

“No accountability means no deterrence of future crimes, no retribution for victims, no social condemnation of the responsible party,” said Bonnie Docherty, senior arms division researcher at Human Rights Watch and the report’s lead author. “The many obstacles to justice for potential victims show why we urgently need to ban fully autonomous weapons.”

According to HRW, homicidal robots are more terrifying than drones because they can "select and engage targets without meaningful human control".

“A fully autonomous weapon could commit acts that would rise to the level of war crimes if a person carried them out, but victims would see no one punished for these crimes,” Docherty continued.

“Calling such acts an accident or glitch would trivialize the deadly harm they could cause.”

The report will be distributed at a major international meeting on “lethal autonomous weapon systems” at the UN from April 13 to 17.

This is expected to be attended by up to 120 countries which signed the Convention on Conventional Weapons, which outlawed blinding laster weapons in 1995.

Activists hope killer robots will be subject to a similar ban.