Caribbean nations prepare demand for slavery reparations

Chiwetel Ejiofor, centre, in a scene from 12 Years a Slave. Photograph: Jaap Buitendijk/AP

Heads of state of 15 Caribbean nations will gather in St Vincent on Monday to unveil a plan demanding reparations from Europe for the enduring suffering inflicted by the Atlantic slave trade.

In an interview with the Guardian, Sir Hilary Beckles, who chairs the reparations task force charged with framing the 10 demands, said the plan would set out areas of dialogue with former slave-trading nations including the UK, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. He dismissed claims that the Caribbean nations were attempting to extract vast sums from European taxpayers, insisting that money was not the main objective.

“The British media has been obsessed with suggesting that we expect billions of dollars to be extracted from European states,” he said. “Contrary to the British media, we are not exclusively concerned with financial transactions, we are concerned more with justice for the people who continue to suffer harm at so many levels of social life.”

Beckles also tried to assuage fears that “this is opening up a can of worms leading to litigation”. “That is not our aim at all,” he said. “Our aim is to open up a dialogue with European states.”

The 10-point plan will be unveiled on Monday at the heads of government meeting of Caricom, the regional political and economic body. Given the head of steam behind the reparations movement in the Caribbean, the blueprint is expected to be approved. It will then go forward for discussion with European governments.

The claims are being channeled through the United Nations convention on the elimination of racial discrimination, and processed with the help of the London law firm Leigh Day.

Among the demands made on European former slave trade nations are that they:

• provide diplomatic help to persuade countries such as Ghana and Ethiopia to offer citizenship to the children of people from the Caribbean who “return” to Africa. Some 30,000 have made such a journey to Africa and have been offered generous settlement packages, but lack of citizenship rights for their children is causing difficulties;

• devise a development strategy to help improve the lives of poor communities in the Caribbean still devastated by the after-effects of slavery;

• support cultural exchanges between the Caribbean and west Africa to help Caribbean people of African descent rebuild their sense of history and identity;

• back literacy drives designed to improve education levels that are still dire in many Caribbean communities;

• provide medical assistance to the region that is struggling from high levels of chronic diseases such as hypertension and type 2 diabetes that the Caricom reparations commission links to the fallout from slavery.

One of the most important, and most contentious, demands will be for European countries to issue an unqualified apology for what they did in shipping millions of men, women and children from Africa to the Caribbean and America in the 17th and 18th centuries. Beckles was scathing of European leaders who have issued statements of regret about slavery, including Tony Blair who in 2007, as UK prime minister, said the slave trade was a matter of “deep sorrow and regret” .

“It was disgraceful to speak of regret rather than to apologise,” Beckles said. “That was a disrespectful act on Blair’s part as it implied that nothing can be done about it – ‘Take our expression of regret and go away’.”

The most positive response from any of the relevant European governments has come so far from Sweden, which said it has “respect for the process” on reparations emerging from the Caribbean. But the UK government has expressed scepticism, with the Foreign Office telling the Guardian last month that “we do not see reparations as the answer. Instead, we should concentrate on identifying ways forward.”

For Beckles, a historian who is pro-vice-chancellor of the University of the West Indies in Barbados, the reparations issue is personal. His great-great-grandparents were slaves on the Barbadian plantation owned by ancestors of the British actor Benedict Cumberbatch.

Benedict Cumberbatch, left, with Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years A Slave. Photograph: Jaap Buitendijk/AP

Beckles’s great-great-grandmother was herself a Cumberbatch.

Cumberbatch, who plays a plantation owner in the Oscar-winning film 12 Years A Slave, has said he took on a previous role as the abolitionist William Pitt the Younger as a “sort of apology” for his family’s involvement in the trade.

Beckles said that 12 Years A Slave, which was directed by Steve McQueen, a Briton of Grenadian descent, and starred Chiwetel Ejiofor, a Briton of Nigerian descent, had made a “very important step in the right direction” in its unstinting portrayal of the brutality of slavery. He said he would like to see a similar treatment of the subject from the perspective of Britain rather than America.

“America has made efforts to reflect on their own history, but Britain has made no such effort to do so. If the British public were shown slavery in their own society seen through the eyes of the enslaved, they would get a much better understanding,” he said.

New Co-op storm as board awards bosses huge pay and bonus deals

Last year a £1.5bn black hole was revealed in the finances of the Co-op's banking division. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The embattled Co-operative Group, still reeling from a banking scandal and preparing to lay off up to 5,000 employees, faces a new storm over plans to pay its chief executive more than £3.5m in his first year in the job, while massively boosting the salaries and bonuses of other senior staff.

The proposals will see the issue of executive pay dragged once again into the spotlight, after two leading banks last week confirmed that they were to pay hundreds of staff a million pounds or more. They also threaten to plunge the Co-op into further controversy after a disastrous recent period.

Last year it revealed a £1.5bn black hole in the finances of its banking division. The discovery was made several months before the Co-operative Bank's former chairman, Paul Flowers, a Methodist minister,was shamed for allegedly buying hard drugs, including crystal meth.

Those revelations tarnished the Co-op brand and raised questions about how and why the previous board had appointed Flowers to such an important role.

Documents marked "Private & Confidential", seen by the Observer and prepared for the group remuneration and appointments committee, refer to the significant problems the Co-op's new executive team has inherited. They suggest that the salary packages for chief executive Euan Sutherland and his fellow directors are necessary because "the [Co-op's] executive agenda is possibly the most complex one facing a large business in the country today".

Salary consultants brought in by the Co-op based the proposed remuneration packages on comparisons with FTSE 30 and FTSE 100-listed companies of a similar size to the mutualised group that is owned by its 8 million members. But the huge salary increases are likely to be seen by some as at odds with the history of the co-operative movement and its traditionally egalitarian ethos.

Under the proposals, Sutherland will be paid a base salary of £1.5m this year, plus a £1.5m retention payment. With pension contributions and other extras, such as compensation for buying him out of his previous contract, Sutherland will receive £3.66m this year. His predecessor, Peter Marks, received just over £1.3m last year.

Richard Pennycook, the chief operating officer, will receive a £900,000 salary and a retention payment of £900,000. Six other executives will be paid salaries between £500,000 and £650,000 – and the same amount in retention. In the past, senior executives of the Co-op received between £200,000 and £400,000.

It has also emerged that Rebecca Skitt, the Co-op's chief human resources officer, who joined in February 2013, left last month with a proposed pay-off totalling more than £2m.

A person familiar with the proposals said they represented a "high noon" for the Co-op. It is believed that not all of the board back the proposals, which are likely to play badly with some of the hundreds of elected members who sit on the Co-op's national and regional boards. "Many are likely to be appalled," suggested one person familiar with their thinking.

Sutherland, who became chief executive last May, has admitted that the group's full-year 2013 figures, due later this month and expected to reveal losses of £2bn, will be "pretty ugly". To sort out its finances, the Co-op is looking to sell its pharmacies and farms and make cost savings that could see between 4,000 and 5,000 staff made redundant.

Sutherland has expressed fears that the Co-op has "lost touch with its customers and members and with the communities in which it operates – we haven't been listening". He has questioned continued donations of up to £1m a year to the Labour party and a number of its MPs.

His efforts at modernising the Co-op have been treated with suspicion by some members who believe he is keen on demutualisation, a claim he strenuously denies. His supporters argue that his efforts, and those of his fellow executives, saved the bank from going under, something that would have triggered a taxpayer-funded bailout costing potentially billions of pounds.

"Last year, the Co-operative Group faced the biggest crisis in its 150-year history with the need to recapitalise its bank," said Ursula Lidbetter, chair of the Co-operative Group. "We saved the bank, without recourse to the taxpayer, and we are now embarking on the long journey to revitalise the wider group. That means reducing debt, improving performance and streamlining a business that had become grossly inefficient. It is against that backdrop that we recruited Euan Sutherland and a team with the skills and experience needed at this crucial stage in our history.

"The remuneration packages of our executives are in the middle of a range of comparable companies. This represents an increase on the pay of their predecessors to reflect the greater commercial, management and turnaround experience they are bringing to bear. Euan and his team have already made a significant contribution to the group and we are confident that they will continue to do so."

Critics question the "bomb-proof" nature of the remuneration packages, which will be paid out regardless of any turnaround in the Co-op's fortunes this year."We all want the Co-op to be strong and successful again," said Lord Oakeshott, the former Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman and a Co-operative Bank customer. "But gigantic golden hellos for the new bosses send the wrong message to millions of loyal members, customers and staff. Of course, managers should be well rewarded – when they've turned the business around sustainably over the next five years."

Last week there was anger when it emerged that almost 500 Barclays and 75 Lloyds Banking Group staff were being paid more than £1m, sparking claims a bonus bonanza had returned to the City

Julian Assange tells SXSW audience: ‘NSA has grown to be a rogue agency

Julian Assange, here pictured in December 2013, told SXSW ‘all of us have to do something’ about government surveillance. Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

The Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on Saturday told an audience in Texas that people power is the key to rolling back the power of the National Security Agency and other surveillance agencies.

“We have to do something about it. All of us have to do something about it,” he said, in an interview at the SXSW conference in Austin. “How can individuals do something about it? Well, we’ve got no choice.”

Assange was speaking in a “virtual” conversation conducted by video from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been confinedsince June 2012. The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald will appear in similar sessions over the coming days.

Interviewed by Benjamin Palmer of the marketing agency the Barbarian Group, Assange discussed issues including government surveillance, online democracy and the future of the internet.

On life within the embassy, he said: “It is a bit like prison. Arguably prison is far worse in relation to restrictions on visitors, for example, and the level of bureaucracy involved.” Noting that at any given point there are about a dozen police officers stationed outside, he said: “The UK government has admitted to spending $8m so far just on the police surveillance of the embassy.”

Asked for his views on what governments should be doing, after the NSA revelations, about the way surveillance agencies interact with people, Assange said: “The NSA has grown to be a rogue agency. It has grown to be unfettered … the ability to surveil everyone on the planet is almost there, and arguably will be there within a few years. And that’s led to a huge transfer of power from the people who are surveilled upon, to those who control the surveillance complex.”

Assange talked about a historical “PR campaign based on not existing” for the NSA, which he said had been swept away by the revelations prompted by Snowden’s leaking of thousands of documents to media outlets including the Guardian.

“That let everyone see that somehow this was an important element of power, and it had been developed unnoticed to people,” he said. “How had it come to this? How is it that the internet that everyone looked upon as perhaps the greatest tool of human emancipation there had ever been, had been co-opted and was now involved in the most aggressive form of state surveillance ever seen?”

Assange said the NSA’s traditional practice of not responding to press reports – “to give no oxygen” – would have to be replaced, although he suggested the Pentagon rather than the NSA would guide any new strategy.

“The internet four years ago was a politically apathetic space,” he said, noting that exceptions included the Anonymous group, albeit on an “amateur” basis. Assange suggested that publicity around some of his own organisation’s bigger revelations had opened the eyes of more internet users.

“Many people developed a sense that this space that they had enjoyed, the place where people communicated ideas [was] where all their friends were; [it was] their community’s interface with the regular power community of what we might call the geriatric quo: the old men with guns who control all the money.

“That spread out in different places in different ways, not just because of our [Wikileaks’] efforts, but through others as well. Through the Arab Spring, though Occupy … and the internet became a political space.”

Asked about the motivation behind Wikileaks, Assange talked about the importance of revealing information that had hitherto been kept secret.

“It became clear to me that one of the best ways to achieve justice is to expose injustice. And you can be simplistic about it, which some people are. It’s not that when you expose something automatically there is justice,” he said. Instead, he said: “There’s always a really decent chance that they’re not going to get away with it, and the people affected can take some kind of action. And there’s no confidence in the power being deployed. No confidence in the injustice.”

Assange was asked about whether, thanks to the NSA revelations, the web was under threat. He pointed to comments made this week by a US military figure about a bill being put to Congress to try to “stop publication of material about the National Security Agency”, backed by new cyberterrorism legislation.

“There is a really serious attempt to try and stop these revelations and others, and introduce a new international regime of censorship,” he said, pointing to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement as a particular threat.

“Now that the internet has merged with human society … the laws that apply to the internet apply to human society. This penetration of the internet by the NSA and [British spy agency] GCHQ is the penetration of our human society. It means there has been a militarisation of our civilian space. A military occupation of our civilian space … is a very serious matter.”

Assange attacked what he sees as the powerlessness of even the most theoretically powerful politicians, and asked what would happen if President Barack Obama said tomorrow he was immediately disbanding the NSA, or even the CIA. “On paper he has that power, but we all know that this is simply impossible,” he said. “People would come up with lots of dirt attacking him in some manner … the National Security Agency has dirt on everyone.

Julian Assange beamed in remotely for his SXSW interview. Photograph: Stuart Dredge/The Guardian

“We have to do something about it. All of us have to do something about it … How can individuals do something about it? Well, we’ve got no choice. It’s not the case any more that you can hide from the state, and keep your head down, and hope that by sucking up or by being innocuous you can be spared.

“We are now all involved in this. We are all involved in what we traditionally called the state, whether we like it or not. So we have no choice but to try to manage the behaviour of the state that we have been forced to be part of.”

Assange also described what he sees as an “unprecedented theft of wealth from the majority of the population to those people who already have a lot of power … doing that in part by stealing information from all of us. Knowledge is power, and as a result they’re getting more power.”

He portrayed Wikileaks’ mission as “going after” organisations that accumulate knowledge and “putting it back into our common intellectual record, our common history … and that empowers us”.

Assange also suggested that 20-year-olds now are “much more worldly” than 20-year-olds were 10 years ago, as a result of this transfer of knowledge, which he thinks Wikileaks takes some of the credit for. He talked about future plans for Wikileaks, saying that it is preparing an “important” new release of material, but warned that he prefers not to give “the alleged perpetrator the heads up before the alleged victims … they simply prepare to counterspin”.

Assange was asked about The Intercept, the new online publicationfounded by Greenwald and funded by billionaire tech investor Pierre Omidyar.

“Pierre Omidyar has seen that there is not even liberty for people who have $8bn any more,” he said. “Omidyar is a symptom of a new elite in the United States that feels it is genuinely threatened by what is going on with the National Security Agency, and that is important.”

Assange also talked about his future targets, suggesting that there is a need for many more “grand disclosures”, both from Wikileaks and other sources.

“We are actually living in a world that we don’t understand,” he said. “Before all this material came out, CableGate or what we did with the Iraq war, or Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA, we were going about our business in what we thought was the world. But we weren’t living in the world: we were living in some fictitious representation of what we thought was the world. And we are still living in this fictitious representation.

“We are walking around constantly in this fog where we can’t even see the ground. We think we can see the ground, but we’re wrong. And every so often a clearing in the fog happens when there is one of these grand disclosures. And we see the ground, and we are surprised.

Missing Malaysia Airlines flight may have turned around before it vanished

Relatives of passengers on the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 arrive for a meeting with airline officials in Beijing. Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

The Malaysia Airlines flight missing with 239 on board may have turned around just before it vanished from radar screens, the country's air force chief said on Sunday as the government said it had contacted counter-terrorism agencies around the world following concerns over unidentified passengers.

Transport and defence minister Hishamuddin Hussein said officials were considering all possible explanations for the disappearance of flight MH370, adding: "We cannot jump the gun. Our focus now is to find the plane."

The airline warned families to prepare for the worst as the search widened amid inconclusive reports that debris had been spotted floating in the sea between Vietnam and Malaysia.

At least two people on the plane were travelling together on stolen passports, fuelling concerns about the Boeing-777's abrupt disappearance in the early hours of Saturday. However, experts said there were many possible reasons for why it vanished and for people to travel on false documents.

Malaysian officials said they were looking at four suspect identities and were examining the entire passenger manifest. Interpol confirmed that at least two passports were listed in its database as stolen and that it was examining other documents.

The international police agency's secretary general, Ronald Noble, said it had spent years urging countries to screen all passports systematically. "Now, we have a real case where the world is speculating whether the stolen passport holders were terrorists, while Interpol is asking why only a handful of countries worldwide are taking care to make sure that persons possessing stolen passports are not boarding international flights," he said.

Two-thirds of the travellers were Chinese, while the rest were from elsewhere in Asia, North America and Europe.

The vast search area in the seas between Malaysia and Vietnam expanded further on Sunday because of the plane's apparent turn off course. At least 40 ships and 22 aircraft from Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia, China and the United States are participating in the hunt.

The head of the MMEA, Mohd Amdan Kurish, left, checks a radar during the search for the missing plane. Photograph: AP

The director general of the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) said it had sent a patrol ship to gather samples from an oil slick to determine whether the oil came from the flight or a passing ship, the government-backed Bernama website reported. No debris was found nearby.

The Beijing-bound Boeing-777 had reached cruising altitude when it disappeared from radar screens around 40 minutes after taking off from Kuala Lumpur at 12.40am on Saturday. Both the airline and the aircraft model have strong safety records. The weather was generally good and the plane did not issue a distress signal.

Malaysia's air force chief Rodzali Daud told a press conference that it appeared to have gone off-route. "We are trying to make sense of this … The military radar indicated that the aircraft may have made a turn back and in some parts, this was corroborated by civilian radar," he said.

The chief executive of Malaysia Airlines, Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, said the plane had not informed the airline and air traffic control authorities of its change of course, as it was supposed to do in such circumstances.

The pilot of another flight told a Malaysian newspaper he had made brief contact with the plane via his emergency frequency at the request of Vietnamese aviation authorities who were expecting it to enter their airspace but had been unable to reach it.

The unnamed man said he was deep into Vietnamese airspace when officials asked him to relay to MH370 to establish its position, and that he succeeded at around 1.30am – around 10 minutes after the last recorded flight data.

"There [was] a lot of interference … static … but I heard mumbling from the other end," he said, adding that he believed the voice belonged to the co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid. He then lost the connection, he told the New Straits Times.

An airline pilot who flew within 100 nautical miles of the route 12 hours before the Malaysia Airline flight disappeared said there were large thunderstorms in the area, with some turbulence, but the weather did not appear to pose serious problems for commercial flights.

While the circumstances of the plane's disappearance are extremely unusual, an Air France flight vanished without warning over the South Atlantic in 2009; investigators blamed that crash on a combination of technical problems and pilot error.

Experts also cautioned that there were various reasons why people could be on board with invalid documents.

In 2010, when an Air India Express flight overshot the runway at Mangalore, killing 160, it emerged that 10 of those on board had fraudulent passports.

One US Department of Homeland Security official told the Los Angeles Times: "Just because they were stolen doesn't mean the travellers were terrorists."

Vietnamese air force crew prepare to head out from Tan Son Nhat airport to search for the Malaysian airliner. Photograph: AP

The passengers, using the names Luigi Maraldi and Christian Kozel, bought consecutive tickets on 6 March from China Southern, which had a codeshare agreement for the flight, paying in Thai baht. They were booked together to Beijing, where they would have had a stopover of just over 10 hours before travelling onwards to Amsterdam. "Maraldi" was then booked to fly to Copenhagen while "Kozel" was booked on a flight to Frankfurt.

Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, Malaysia's civil aviation chief, told a press conference investigators were looking at CCTV footage of the individuals on those passports "from check-in to departure".

The real Maraldi and Kozel – Italian and Austrian nationals respectively – had previously reported their passports stolen in the region. Maraldi told a Thai website he lost his in a deal that went wrong at a motorcycle rental shop in Phuket.

The Malaysian transport and defence minister Hishammuddin Hussein said authorities were looking at two more possible cases of suspicious identities. "All the four names are with me and have been given to our intelligence agencies," he said. "We are looking at all possibilities."

No information has been issued on the other cases under review. Chinese state media reported that one of the passport numbers reported on the manifest belonged to a man from Fujian, eastern China, who was safe and well. But his name was not that listed alongside the number, which according to the manifest belonged to another Chinese man. The man told police his passport had not been lost or stolen.

An FBI team is on its way to assist the investigation because three Americans were on board. Experts from the National Transportation Safety Board – which investigates all US domestic civil aviation crashes – the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing are also flying to the region, the NTSB said in a statement.

The CEO of a Malaysia Airlines subsidiary told reporters the plane was last inspected 10 days ago and found to be "in proper condition".

Bollywood to make another trip to Hollywood: Irrfan Khan to star in Jurassic Park 4

Actor Irrfan Khan is to star in the fourth edition of the Steven Spielberg-produced Hollywood series, Jurassic Park. He will be playing the role of Patel, the billionaire owner of a new Jurassic Park.

Well-placed sources close to the project confirm the development, saying, “Yes, he is doing Jurassic World. His role is not negative, as is being reported by some sections of the international media. He will be seen as the owner of the new Jurassic Park.”

It is thus obvious that Khan has a substantial role to play in the film. The actor, on his part, chooses his words carefully but doesn’t deny the ¬development: “It is not ¬correct for me to comment, unless the studio allows.”

His official website, too, announces Jurassic World among his upcoming films.

The film is the fourth edition of the popular Jurassic Park franchise, and will be placed in real time in 2015 — 22 years after the events of the first film, Jurassic Park (1993). Directed by Colin Trevorrow, the film that stars actors Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jake Johnson, and Nick Robinson, is up for a June 2015 release

New ‘Game of Thrones’ to premiere at New York arena

NEW YORK-

The first episode of the new “Game of Thrones” season will be screened at a New York arena on March 20 – two weeks before the smash show returns on HBO.

Up to 7,000 seats will be available at the Barclays Center charity event, it was announced Wednesday, with tickets for the premiere of the medieval fantasy adventure – dubbed “The Epic Fan Experience” – costing $15 each.

The centerpiece of the night will be the blockbuster screening of the hotly anticipated new episode on a stadium-sized screen, the Barclays Center said on its website.

“Game of Thrones has become a truly global sensation thanks to the show”s incredibly dedicated and loyal fans,” said Zach Enterlin, senior vice president of advertising and promotion at HBO.

“To create an event that matches the excitement of the viewers and the epic scale of this series, we knew we had to do something really special.

“A fan screening of this size, at a venue like Barclays Center, feels like the perfect way to celebrate the new season of Game of Thrones.”

The series returns to HBO on April 6.

Geneva Motor Show : In a driverless future, drivers will do anything but drive

GENEVA-

Brew an espresso, watch a movie on a large screen, surf the Internet or simply sit and chat with friends?

As automakers and technology firms steer towards a future of driverless cars, a Swiss think tank is at the Geneva Motor Show this week showing off its vision of what vehicles might look like on the inside when people no longer have to focus on the road.

“Once I can drive autonomously, would I want to watch while my steering wheel turns happily from left to right?” asked Rinspeed founder and chief executive Frank Rinderknecht.

“No. I would like to do anything else but drive and watch the traffic. Eat, sleep, work, whatever you can imagine,” he told AFP at the show, which opens its doors to the public Thursday.

Google is famously working on fully autonomous cars, and traditional carmakers are rapidly developing a range of autonomous technologies as well.

With analysts expecting sales of self-driving, if not completely driverless, cars to begin taking off by the end of this decade, Rinderknecht insists it’s time to consider how the experience of riding in a car will could be radically redefined.

Patting his shiny Xchange concept car, Rinderknecht says he envisages a future where car passengers will want to do the same kinds of things we today do to kill time on trains an airplanes.

So Rinspeed has revamped the interior of Tesla’s Model S electric car to show carmakers how they might turn standard-sized vehicles into entertainment centres, offices and meeting spots wrapped into one.

The seats can slide, swivel, and tilt into more than 20 positions, allowing passengers to turn to face each other or a 32-inch screen in the back.

Up front too, an entertainment system lines the entire length of the dashboard, and the steering wheel can be shifted to allow passengers a better view of the screens.

Carmakers at the Geneva Motor Show seemed to agree that vehicles that drive themselves, at least to a certain extent, are on the horizon.

“Autonomous driving is an inevitability that we are approaching very rapidly,” Hyundai Europe COO Allan Rushforth told a foreign news agency,

He stressed though that “full automation” was not a priority.

Ford Europe chief Stephen Odelle also said the technology was speeding forward, but added that he believed “the technology will be ready before legislation and consumers are.”

“How comfortable will consumers be with fully automated cars?” he asked, adding that legislating for liability would be quite tricky with no driver behind the wheel.

Rinderknecht acknowledged there are obstacles, but insisted “they can be overcome.”
He pointed out that accident reduction is actually a major argument for automation, since once the technology is finalised the machines should be far more reliable than humans.

And while it will be an upward battle to redefine liability legislation, “I think it can be done, because laws must adapt to life, and life as we all know changes,” he said