For those valuable historical perspectives.

The Red Cross press release does not know its early 20th century history - and is ignorant of the Laws of War as understood by Spaight and others.
Just to replace the Red Cross (The ICRC in fact) in its perspectives. ICRC recognises The Hague treaty but uses only the GC (1949 and after) as a discussion base in its debats. With time I have learned to pass over this quite frustrating aspect of the ICRC (As some others on their historical role during several conflicts).
So please excuse them for not being as highly educated as you.

Personnaly I found that press release interresting as it recognises the advantages of new technologies for the civilian protection enforcement. It is an unexpected out come of the Lybia campaign after more than a decade of critics of air ops and intelligent ammunitions. For the very first time since long ICRC recognises that new weapons can be a "progress" and does not call for a ban.

What is the status of those who operate drones thousands of miles away from the battlefield? Could robots be capable of the level of discrimination required under international humanitarian law?
I find this question quite important. If it applies immediatly mainly to soldiers from formal armies (US, UK, Israel, Fr...), it also will soon (or is already) apply to non state armies. Hezbolla developed an "improvised" observation drone and the Libyan rebels developed improvised combat robots (based on US model).
It is clear that if on one end the search for the lower casualties among your troops is an immediat benefit of the new technologies, the responsability of those operating such weapons has to be explore.
Similar question was raised with the A bomb and the status of the ones who would push the button. And responsabilities according to the principle of chain of command and human responsability has been preserved.

I believe that is where the debat can be interresting and valuable. Especially in the field to help those who will have to make the desision. In addition of the SOP, TOE, ROE, what are the parameters that will make a decision legally sound (even with collateral victimes, unfortunately) or abusive?