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2 024 Arms Control Person(s) of the Year Winner Announced
(Washington, D.C.)—A ustrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg and the Austrian Foreign Ministry were selected as the 2024 “Arms Control Persons of the Year” through a recent online voting process that engaged thousands of participants from dozens of countries.
The annual contest is organized by the independent, nongovernmental Arms Control Association. The contest has been held each year since 2007.
Schallenberg and the Austrian Foreign Ministry were nominated for their leadership for convening the April 2024 Vienna Conference on Autonomous Weapons Systems [[link removed]] and for successfully advancing a United Nations General Assembly resolution [[link removed]] on lethal autonomous weapons systems that highlights the urgent need to open negotiations on a new treaty to ban them.
The new resolution (79/L.77), which was adopted in late 2024, won the support of 166 countries [[link removed]] . It will create a new UN forum to discuss the serious challenges and concerns raised by weapons systems that select and apply force to targets based on sensor processing rather than human input.
“I cannot overstate the urgency of the regulation of autonomous weapons. This is, I believe, the 'Oppenheimer moment' of our generation! Now is the time to agree on international rules and norms to ensure human control,” Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg said.
“Humanity finds itself at a crossroads. We need to come together to define and agree upon norms and rules for autonomous weapons. It is crucial to safeguard human control and the human element when it comes to the deployment of such weapons systems,” he added.
“If the global community fails to act swiftly, the opportunity to establish legal guardrails will be lost before autonomous weapons systems become widely deployed, potentially leading to devastating consequences,” warns Austria's director of the Disarmament, Arms Control and Nonproliferation Department at the Austrian Ministry for Foreign Affairs in a feature article in the current issue of Arms Control Today [[link removed]] .
“We commend Minister Schallenberg and his team for stepping forward at this critical juncture to provide political leadership to focus international attention on the need to arrive at common sense regulations and safeguards and to accelerate the slow pace of multilateral discussions,” remarked Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association.
A total of ten individuals and groups were nominated by the Arms Control Association staff and board of directors for the annual Arms Control Person(s) of the Year honor.
“This contest is a reminder of the positive initiatives—some at the grassroots level, some on the international scale—designed to advance disarmament, nuclear security, and international peace, security, and justice,” Kimball said.
The runners-up in this year’s contest were the UN Delegations of Ireland and New Zealand and 48 co-sponsoring states for successfully advancing United Nations General Assembly resolution [[link removed]] , mandating an updated, independent scientific study on nuclear war effects.
Online voting for the 2024 Arms Control Person(s) of the Year contest was open from Dec. 13, 2024, until Jan. 13, 2025. A list of all of this year's nominees is available at ArmsControl.org/ACPOY/2024 [[link removed]] .
Previous recent winners of the “Arms Control Person of the Year” include: the U.S. Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado and the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky (2023); the Energoatom staff working at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (2022) and Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard and the Government of Mexico (2021).
A complete list of winners from previous years is available here [[link removed]] .
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