Who is socially responsible for cloned humans

According to changes in creation and based on the principle of non-possession of body for human and therefore, the danger and necessity of permissibility in this regard showed the ultimate prohibition of human cloning. Despite the four categories and disagreements, most of the jurists banned human cloning. In other words, although according to the principle of presumption of innocence, initially, most of the Islamic intellects ruled on its natural permissibility and those who agreed and prescribed the cloning mentioned some of the applications and functions of this technology.

But ultimately, a large number of the Muslim jurists considered it as the secondary prohibition despite its primary and natural permissibility. The significance of jurisprudential analysis of therapeutic cloning is due to the unique features of the technique which play a crucial and exclusive role in treatment of incurable and deadly diseases.

Despite such a wonderful role, whose aspects reveal development of scientific researches everyday, it is required that the jurisprudence has comment on the mentioned problem, the problem which is referred as the loss of ethical dignity and human right on the embryo. When embryo is developed, three actions can be undertaken including, i To allow to be destroyed, ii To place it in uterus where it develops into a human similar to the donor of the cell in terms of growth, and iii T use it to obtain stem cells.

The operation is the third stage of therapeutic cloning which is described later. It should be known that which one of the three stages of therapeutic cloning is permitted and which is not? Naturally, if only one of the stages is considered prohibited, it is not possible to give fatwa of permission for therapeutic cloning which includes all the stages.

The permission of therapeutic cloning is subject to permissibility of all the stages. Now to review the three stages: The first stage is the use of the cell from human body which is automatically not objected. If there is a problem, it is in the next stages which are not related to this stage. In the second stage, the cell is processed and developed for the next stage when the cell is at 6 or 7-day of age.

In this process, three actions should be done: i Enucleation of cell, ii Placing it into the enucleated oocyte, and iii Simulating the oocyte by chemical or electrical current to start cell division.

This type of manipulation in this stage is not prohibitive itself. The only problem is that it might be banned as the point of prohibition. Of course, this initial point is the time when we know that if the operation begins and due to loss of control, the opportunity of abuse in the situation is available and the development of human embryo becomes inevitable.

If human cloning, either as primary or secondary, is a prohibited operation, the operation as the starting point of prohibition will be prevented.

But, the third stage is the extraction of the hidden cell mass in the embryo for culturing and obtaining stem cells.

This problem caused a serious disagreement in Christianity and Islam in this stage. The problem is the extraction of cell mass which results in disappearing and killing of the fetus and its potential to become a human. Naturally, there is a difference between the three categories. The category of sanctity for murder is more severe than the sanctity for the second and third categories. In the third one, the most important rule can be performed easier and more; that is, based on this theory, it can be said that although embryo destruction is banned, whenever a human is suffering from a severe illness and sometimes leading to death, with respect to the more importance of the human life, the embryo is allowed to be destroyed to obtain the stem cell to treat the patient.

As cloning is not still very common and is in the stage of development and has not been tested after birth, the countries with cloning technology do not have a complete and codified law for it. Human cloning may legally cause problems, including the reproduced individual that will be completely similar to the genetic donor, even his fingerprints, and it is exclusive for everybody and considered as the major factor to arrest the offender.

So the genetic owner can commit a crime and escape from law, and allocate his action to the cloned individual or vice versa. Thus, the rights and freedom of both of them will be withdrawn. In addition, the real culprit will not be identified and the rights of the accused person will be ignored. The cloned human does not have a father because it is not from the male sperm and a mother because it is not by composition of gamete and a sister and a brother and a relative, and it is grown in the uterus which is not of his mother but the surrogate mother.

In brief, he is an individual with no relativity. If a virgin woman has a child by cloning of her sexual cell, is her pregnancy legitimate or not? And is the born baby her clone or sister or daughter? Who does the cloned individual inherits? If somebody kills the cloned individual, what are the rules for compensation or retribution? And who is responsible for alimony and custodianship of the cloned individual? There are some other legal problems too. One of the tens of reasons for brain drain is lack of right and proper laws to protect scientists and intellects.

At the time of writing the review, it is unlikely that individuals or centers in the country, process the idea of the human cloning and perhaps, they have made arrangements and taken into action in this field.

This idea and the probability of its occurrence have revealed the lawful Iranian responsibility more than before and showed the necessity of taking immediate action to fill this legal gap.

It seems that the prospects of every country about therapeutic cloning are dependent on the worth of human embryo in the legal system. Certainly, in the countries where the value of embryonic and fetal is not considered equal to life or even health of the human and due to different reasons, abortion is not legally banned, the therapeutic cloning encounter less challenges. To clarify the criminal liabilities of physicians and law of human cases in genetic experiments and new therapeutic methods such as cloning, the Iranian criminal laws should be studied.

Unfortunately, the law of Iran has not changed along with developments and progresses in medical sciences, and Iran is one of the countries where law has not passed about cloning. The only available regulations in our country codified by consultative committees are affiliated to the research institutes include two documents and despite that they are called by laws, the executive bylaws of ethical principles in researches of medical sciences and ethical guides of researches on gametes and embryos, they lack legal standards and sanction and as their titles suggest, they should be called ethics doctrine.

Thus, only those cases of Islamic penal code approved in and law on method of donating embryos to infertile couples approved in are to be responsive to new challenges. Some might argue that based on principle constitution law states that the judge is bound to endeavor to find the ruling on every case in the law and if not found, according to Islamic sources or fatwa, would issue the ruling.

They cannot refuse handling of the case and issuing the ruling under the pretext of silence or deficiency or brevity or conflict of laws. The rule of law can be derived if required, a legal action can be taken into account.

In reply to such cases, it should be said that on one hand, the principle mostly includes the civil cases and if its content is accepted in criminal issues, case issues not phenomenon to this extent, would be with effective outcome. The prospects of scholars and views of Islamic jurists and different fatwas and often conflicting responses with uncertainty in dealing with various issues of this technology, are additional reasons to the inadequacy of the response.

Although mostly after the emergence of the phenomena and the related challenges, legislators take actions to pass and approve laws with respect to requirements and structure and sources and development capacities of civil rights and future legal researches, if the time gap lengthens between the phenomena and provision of the necessary related law, it causes corruption and irreparable consequences; especially, on the critical and vital issues which have created great concerns about human rights and criminal laws for the human of the third millennium.

If person or persons practice human cloning, what legal acts are there to deal with them? Are there any rules considered in the related laws to take legal actions against the operators and users of the technology? If yes, to what extent are they expressive and comprehensive and if not, what should be done against the practice and the perpetrators?

If any person or persons practice human cloning, what legal actions are there against them? Some of the practical policies which should be done include public education, description of probable risks and disadvantages of human cloning and placing religious and ethical scholars next to researchers of cloning.

Therefore, we can conclude that the right method is guiding and controlling the cloning technology and banning the technique is not always fruitful. If it is proved, the phenomenon is considered as example of required affairs based on creation of ethical, social and medical disorders. Religious and ethical rulings cannot be permission for it, and it seems that it is a point that only one case can be a response to it and it needs nothing but time. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U.

World J Plast Surg. Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Copyright notice. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC.

Abstract In recent years, the cloning technology has remarkably developed in Iran, but unfortunately, the required legal framework has not been created to support and protect such developments yet. References 1. Khorrami J. Consequences and reactions of human cloning. Lederberg J. Experimental Genetics and Human Evolution.

When challenged, the defenders of these purposes often appeal to larger moral and political goods. These typically fall within the following three categories: human freedom, existence, and well-being.

Strictly speaking, the appeal to human freedom is not so much a defense of cloning itself as it is of the right to practice it, asserted against those who seek to prohibit it. No one, we suspect, would say that he wanted to clone himself or any one else in order to be free or to vindicate the goodness of liberty. Nevertheless, human freedom is a defense often heard in support of a "right" to clone. Those who defend cloning-to-produce-children on the grounds of human freedom make two kinds of arguments.

The first is that because individuals in pluralistic societies have different definitions of the good life and of right and wrong, society must protect individual freedom to choose against the possible tyranny of the majority. This means securing and even expanding the rights of individuals to make choices so long as their choices do not directly infringe on the rights and especially the physical safety of other rights-bearing citizens.

In Eisenstadt v. Baird , the United States Supreme Court enunciated what has been called a principle of reproductive freedom: "If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so affecting a person as a decision whether to bear or beget a child.

A second defense of human cloning on the grounds of freedom is the claim that human existence is by its very nature "open-ended," "indeterminate," and "unpredictable. New technologies are central to this open-ended idea of human life, and to shut down such technologies simply because they change the "traditional" ways of doing things is unjustifiable. As constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe has argued in reference to human cloning: "A society that bans acts of human creation that reflect unconventional sex roles or parenting models surrogate motherhood, in vitro fertilization, artificial insemination, and the like for no better reason than that such acts dare to defy 'nature' and tradition and to risk adding to life's complexity is a society that risks cutting itself off from vital experimentation and risks sterilizing a significant part of its capacity to grow.

Like the appeal to freedom, the appeal to the goodness of existence is not an argument for cloning, but an argument against opponents who speak up in the name of protecting the cloned child-to-be against the harms connected with its risky and strange origins as a clone.

This argument asserts that attempts to produce children through cloning, like any attempt to produce a child, will directly benefit the cloned child-to-be, since without the act of cloning the child in question would not exist. Even taking into account the possibility of serious genetic or developmental disorders, this position holds that a cloned individual, once born, would prefer existence as a clone to no existence at all. The third moral argument for cloning-to-produce-children is that it would contribute in certain cases to the fulfillment of human goods that are widely honored and deeply rooted in modern democratic society.

These human goods include the health of newborn and existing children, reproductive possibilities for infertile couples, and the possibility of having a biologically related child. In all these circumstances, human cloning could relieve existing suffering and sorrow or prevent them in the future.

Those who take this position do not necessarily defend human cloning-to-produce-children as such. Rather, they argue that a moral and practical line can be drawn between cloning-to-produce-children that serves the "therapeutic" aims of health for the cloned child-to-be, for the infertile couple, or for an existing child and the "eugenic" aims of producing or mass-producing superior people.

Some people argue more broadly that an existing generation has a responsibility to ensure, to the extent possible, the genetic quality and fitness of the next generation. Human cloning, they argue, offers a new method for human control and self-improvement, by allowing families to have children free of specific genetic diseases or society to reproduce children with superior genetic endowments. It also provides a new means for gaining knowledge about the age-old question of nature versus nurture in contributing to human achievement and human flourishing, and to see how clones of great geniuses measure up against the "originals.

While we as a Council acknowledge merit in some of the arguments made for cloning-to-produce-children, we are generally not persuaded by them. The fundamental weakness of the proponents' case is found in their incomplete view of human procreation and families, and especially the place and well-being of children.

Proponents of cloning tend to see procreation primarily as the free exercise of a parental right, namely, a right to satisfy parental desires for self-fulfillment or a right to have a child who is healthy or "superior.

The principles guiding such prospective parents are freedom for themselves , control over their child , and well-being both for themselves and what they imagine is best for their child. Even taken together, these principles provide at best only a partial understanding of the meaning and entailments of human procreation and child-rearing. In practice, they may prove to undermine the very goods that the proponents of cloning aim to serve, by undermining the unconditional acceptance of one's offspring that is so central to parenthood.

Basic human rights are usually asserted on behalf of the human individual agent: for example, a meaningful right not to be prevented from bearing a child can be asserted for each individual against state-mandated sterilization programs.

But the act of procreation is not an act involving a single individual. Indeed, until human cloning arrives, it continues to be impossible for any one person to procreate alone. More important, there is a crucial third party involved: the child, whose centrality to the activity exposes the insufficiency of thinking about procreation in terms of rights. After all, rights are limited in the following crucial way: they cannot be ethically exercised at the expense of the rights of another.

But the "right to reproduce" cannot be ethically exercised without at least considering the child that such exercise will bring into being and who is at risk of harm and injustice from the exercise. This obligation cannot be waived by an appeal to the absolutist argument of the goodness of existence. Yes, existence is a primary good, but that does not diminish the ethical significance of knowingly and willfully putting a child in grave physical danger in the very act of giving that child existence.

It is certainly true that a life with even severe disability may well be judged worth living by its bearer: "It is better to have been born as I am than not to be here at all. A post-facto affirmation of existence by the harmed child would not retroactively excuse the parental misconduct that caused the child's disability, nor would it justify their failure to think of the child's well-being as they went about exercising their "right to procreate.

In short, the right to decide " whether to bear or beget a child" does not include a right to have a child by whatever means. There are at least some circumstances where reproductive freedom must be limited to protect the good of the child as, for instance, with the ban on incest. Our society's commitment to freedom and parental authority by no means implies that all innovative procedures and practices should be allowed or accepted, no matter how bizarre or dangerous.

Proponents of cloning, when they do take into account the interests of the child, sometimes argue that this interest justifies and even requires thoroughgoing parental control over the procreative process. Yet this approach, even when well-intentioned, may undermine the good of the child more than it serves the child's best interests.

For one thing, cloning-to-produce-children of a desired or worthy sort overlooks the need to restrain the parental temptation to total mastery over children. It is especially morally dubious for this project to go forward when we know so little about the unforeseen and unintended consequences of exercising such genetic control. Parental control is a double-edged sword, and proponents seem not to acknowledge the harms, both physical and psychological, that may befall the child whose genetic identity is selected in advance.

The case for cloning in the name of the child's health and well-being is certainly the strongest and most compelling. The desire that one's child be free from a given genetic disease is a worthy aspiration. We recognize there may be some unusual or extreme cases in which cloning might be the best means to serve this moral good, if other ethical obstacles could somehow be overcome.

A few of us also believe that the desire to give a child "improved" or "superior" genetic equipment is not necessarily to be condemned. However, such aspirations could endanger the personal, familial, and societal goods supported by the character of human procreation.

We are willing to grant that there may be exceptional cases in which cloning-to-produce-children is morally defensible; however, that being said, we would also argue that such cases do not justify the harmful experiments and social problems that might be entailed by engaging in human cloning. Hard cases are said to make bad law. The same would be true for succumbing to the rare, sentimentally appealing case in which cloning seems morally plausible. Finally, proponents do not adequately face up to the difficulty of how "well-being" is to be defined.

Generally, they argue that these matters are to be left up to the free choices of parents and doctors. But this means that the judgments of "proper" and "improper" will be made according to subjective criteria alone, and under such circumstances, it will be almost impossible to rule out certain "improvements" as unacceptable. In the sections that follow, we shall explain more fully why Members of the Council are not convinced by the arguments for cloning-to-produce-children, even in the most defensible cases.

To see why this is so, we need to consider cloning-to-produce-children from the broadest possible moral perspective, beginning with ethical questions regarding experiments on human subjects. What we hope to show is that the frequently made safety arguments strike deeper than we usually realize, and that they point beyond themselves toward more fundamental moral objections to cloning-to-produce-children. We begin with concerns regarding the safety of the cloning procedure and the health of the participants.

We do so for several reasons. First, these concerns are widely, indeed nearly unanimously, shared. Finally, if carefully considered, these concerns begin to reveal the important ethical principles that must guide our broader assessment of cloning-to-produce-children. They suggest that human beings, unlike inanimate matter or even animals, are in some way inviolable , and therefore challenge us to reflect on what it is about human beings that makes them inviolable, and whether cloning-to-produce-children threatens these distinctly human goods.

In initiating this analysis, there is perhaps no better place to start than the long-standing international practice of regulating experiments on human subjects.

It therefore makes sense to consider the safety and health concerns that arise from cloning-to-produce-children in light of the widely shared ethical principles that govern experimentation on human subjects. Since the Second World War, various codes for the ethical conduct of human experimentation have been adopted around the world.

These codes and regulations were formulated in direct response to serious ethical lapses and violations committed by research scientists against the rights and dignity of individual human beings. Among the most important and widely accepted documents to emerge were the Nuremberg Code of 7 and the Helsinki Declaration of The Nuremberg Code laid out ten principles for the ethical conduct of experiments, focusing especially on voluntary consent of research subjects, the principle that experiments should be conducted only with the aim of providing a concrete good for society that is unprocurable by other methods, and with the avoidance of physical or mental harm.

The Helsinki Declaration stated, among other things, that research should be undertaken only when the prospective benefit clearly outweighs the expected risk, when the research subject has been fully informed of all risks, and when the research-subject population is itself likely to benefit from the results of the experiment.

Finally, the Belmont Report proposed three basic ethical principles that were to guide the treatment of human subjects involved in scientific research. The first of these is respect for persons , which requires researchers to acknowledge the autonomy and individual rights of research subjects and to offer special protection to those with diminished autonomy and capacity.

The second principle is beneficence. Scientific research must not only refrain from harming those involved but must also be aimed at helping them, or others, in concrete and important ways. The third principle is justice , which involves just distribution of potential benefits and harms and fair selection of research subjects. When applied, these general principles lead to both a requirement for informed consent of human research subjects and a requirement for a careful assessment of risks and benefits before proceeding with research.

Safety, consent, and the rights of research subjects are thus given the highest priority. It would be a mistake to view these codes in narrow or procedural terms, when in fact they embody society's profound sense that human beings are not to be treated as experimental guinea pigs for scientific research.

More simply stated, the codes attempt to defend the weak against the strong and to uphold the equal dignity of all human beings. In taking up the application of these codes to the case of cloning-to-produce-children, we would suggest that the proper approach is not simply to discover specific places where human cloning violates this or that stipulation of this or that code, but to grapple with how such cloning offends the spirit of these codes and what they seek to defend.

The ethics of research on human subjects suggest three sorts of problems that would arise in cloning-to-produce-children: 1 problems of safety; 2 a special problem of consent; and 3 problems of exploitation of women and the just distribution of risk. We shall consider each in turn. First, cloning-to-produce-children is not now safe. Concerns about the safety of the individuals involved in a cloning procedure are shared by nearly everyone on all sides of the cloning debate. Even most proponents of cloning-to-produce-children generally qualify their support with a caveat about the safety of the procedure.

Cloning experiments in other mammals strongly suggest that cloning-to-produce-children is, at least for now, far too risky to attempt. In animal experiments to date, only a small percentage of implanted clones have resulted in live births, and a substantial portion of those live-born clones have suffered complications that proved fatal fairly quickly.

Some serious though nonfatal abnormalities in cloned animals have also been observed, including substantially increased birth-size, liver and brain defects, and lung, kidney, and cardiovascular problems. Longer-term consequences are of course not known, as the oldest successfully cloned mammal is only six years of age. Medium-term consequences, including premature aging, immune system failure, and sudden unexplained death, have already become apparent in some cloned mammals.

Accompanying the threats to the cloned child's health and well-being are risks to the health of the egg donors. These include risks to her future reproductive health caused by the hormonal treatments required for egg retrieval and general health risks resulting from the necessary superovulation. Animal studies also suggest the likelihood of health risks to the woman who carries the cloned fetus to term. The animal data suggest that late-term fetal losses and spontaneous abortions occur substantially more often with cloned fetuses than in natural pregnancies.

In humans, such late-term fetal losses may lead to substantially increased maternal morbidity and mortality. In addition, animal studies have shown that many pregnancies involving cloned fetuses result in serious complications, including toxemia and excessive fluid accumulation in the uterus, both of which pose risks to the pregnant animal's health. Reflecting on the dangers to birth mothers in animal cloning studies, the National Academy report concluded:.

Because of these risks, there is widespread agreement that, at least for now, attempts at cloning-to-produce-children would constitute unethical experimentation on human subjects and are therefore impermissible. These safety considerations were alone enough to lead the National Bioethics Advisory Commission in June to call for a temporary prohibition of human cloning-to-produce-children.

Similar concerns, based on almost five more years of animal experimentation, convinced the panel of the National Academy of Sciences in January that the United States should ban such cloning for at least five years.

Past discussions of this subject have often given the impression that the safety concern is a purely temporary one that can be allayed in the near future, as scientific advances and improvements in technique reduce the risks to an ethically acceptable level. But this impression is mistaken, for considerable safety risks are likely to be enduring, perhaps permanent.

If so, there will be abiding ethical difficulties even with efforts aimed at making human cloning safe. The reason is clear: experiments to develop new reproductive technologies are necessarily intergenerational, undertaken to serve the reproductive desires of prospective parents but practiced also and always upon prospective children. Any such experiment unavoidably involves risks to the child-to-be, a being who is both the product and also the most vulnerable human subject of the research.

Exposed to risk during the extremely sensitive life-shaping processes of his or her embryological development, any child-to-be is a singularly vulnerable creature, one maximally deserving of protection against risk of experimental and other harm.

If experiments to learn how to clone a child are ever to be ethical, the degree of risk to that child-to-be would have to be extremely low, arguably no greater than for children-to-be who are conceived from union of egg and sperm. It is extremely unlikely that this moral burden can be met, not for decades if at all.

In multiple experiments involving six of the mammalian species cloned to date, more than 89 percent of the cloned embryos transferred to recipient females did not come to birth, and many of the live-born cloned animals are or become abnormal. The oldest cloned mammal Dolly is only six years old and has exhibited unusually early arthritis. Drawing on official records and first-hand observations at bioethics meetings, this article examines the human cloning debate at UNESCO from onwards, thus building on and advancing current scholarship by applying recent ideas on global governance to an empirical case.

It concludes that, although human reproductive cloning is a challenging subject, establishing a robust global governance framework in this area may be possible via an alternative deliberative format, based on knowledge sharing and feasibility testing rather than the interest-based bargaining that is common to intergovernmental organizations and involving a wide range of stakeholders.

This article is published as part of a collection on global governance. Its Bioethics Programme began in The organization deems itself uniquely placed to lead the way in setting bioethical standards, as the only UN agency with a mandate for both the human and social sciences UNESCO, e.

Before long, however, it started to consider a fourth bioethics instrument, an international convention on human cloning. From to it investigated whether an international convention to ban human reproductive cloning is warranted. As member states could not agree on a way forward, the issue was dropped in without a firm decision being made on the need or otherwise for a convention. This can be seen as a global governance failure. In , the Bioethics Programme began to revisit the issue.

This time there was greater consensus on the need for a ban on human reproductive cloning, but no practical progress has been made. This article takes a traditional global governance scenario—a debate within a UN agency about whether to draft an international convention—and asks why the outcome was unsatisfactory. After a brief introduction to a developments in global governance and b the science and ethics of human cloning, the article charts the progress and ultimate collapse of the UNESCO cloning debate from to and developments from onwards.

It concludes that, although human reproductive cloning is a challenging subject, establishing a global governance framework in this area may be possible via an alternative deliberative format. The old, hierarchical model of multilateral governance is considered too rigid Pauwelyn et al.

Traditional intergovernmental organizations have not adapted to the increasing complexity of society and the ensuing need for flexible regulatory mechanisms that can keep pace with scientific development Pauwelyn et al. These problems have led to changes and innovations in both the theory and practice of global governance Ruggie, ; Weiss and Wilkinson, ; Pegram and Acuto, : As Pauwelyn et al.

The international system is becoming more pluralist and less dominated by sovereign states pursuing narrow interests. There has been movement towards voluntary rather than binding regulation, as well as capacity building Pauwelyn et al. Particularly for emerging areas, such as the internet, regulation has been informal, with no discussion of a legally binding treaty Pauwelyn et al.

Although the idea of human cloning excites strong views, there is much confusion about what it would actually entail. These terms are not scientifically accurate, but are commonly used nevertheless.

They stem from the process of somatic cell nuclear transfer, whereby an enucleated egg receives a nucleus from a somatic body cell.

In reproductive cloning, the embryo is implanted into a female for gestation. Through this method, Dolly the Sheep became the first mammal to be cloned in July In therapeutic cloning, an embryo is harvested for stem cells rather than brought to term Wilmut et al. Although therapeutic cloning is held by many to have great potential medically, as a source of compatible tissue and organs for those who need transplants, it generates considerable controversy.

For people who see human life as beginning at fertilization, therapeutic cloning is also reproductive Isasi et al. Since the cloning of Dolly the Sheep, ethicists, lawyers and scientists have argued vigorously both for and against developing this technology for use in humans. Those in favour draw on liberal values, citing reproductive freedom, or hope that cloning will provide a new means to tackle infertility. Those against fear for the psychological health of the clone, who would be unable to enjoy what they see as the inherently human quality of having a unique identity.

In most cases, their laws refer to somatic cell nuclear transfer rather than cloning more generally and thus newer technologies are not covered Lo et al. Hence, at the request of France and Germany, in the UN General Assembly began to deliberate on a binding treaty to prohibit human reproductive cloning. Four years of dispute and discord followed.

Some states were concerned that an embargo on reproductive cloning specifically would implicitly endorse therapeutic or research cloning, whilst those wishing to pursue therapeutic cloning could not support a holistic ban.

With agreement on a binding convention seemingly elusive, the General Assembly opted for a non-binding declaration. It is considered too weak an instrument to either thwart rogue research or promote legitimate scientific endeavour Isasi and Annas, : 63; United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies, : Each committee has 36 members.

Regular joint meetings of the two committees are also held. The IBC has various functions, including promoting bioethics education and reflection on ethical issues. The IBC works on the basis of 2-year Work Programmes human cloning, for example, featured in the — and — programmes , with reflections on particular topics being drafted by specially appointed Working Groups, comprising a small number of IBC members, over the 2-year cycle. Each Group presents their work-in-progress at IBC and IGBC meetings and takes the views expressed at these meetings into account in their final reports.

Scholars from both within and without the Bioethics Programme have analysed its efficacy as a forum for ethical debate and standard-setting. Footnote 1 These analyses have mostly focused on the negotiation of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights. The interest-based bargaining often seen within intergovernmental organizations led to vague wording on beginning and end of life issues and risk assessment, while controversial issues such as sex selection, gene therapy and stem cell research were left out entirely, as states could not reach a consensus on these Schmidt, ; Langlois, However, there has been a lack of buy-in from the global bioethics community, particularly academics, who have questioned the expertise and representativeness of the IBC Cameron : and The lack of enforcement power of the declaration, as a non-binding instrument, has also been noted.

Yet Cameron : and argues that declarations have advantages over conventions, because of their reliance on moral persuasion and their inclusivity in comparison to conventions, which are only binding on those states that accede to them. Many participants did not believe there had been sufficient change in national positions to avoid a repetition of the fractious debate and unsatisfactory outcome at the UN General Assembly a few years before. On the other hand, some delegates underlined the potential utility of a convention for those developing countries yet to legislate on cloning UNESCO, a : 6 and In response to these discussions, the Working Group was more cautious in its final report of June Judging that the introduction of a new international normative instrument would be premature, it recommended increased global dialogue as an alternative UNESCO, a : 7.

The cloning mandate continued into the next Work Programme of — After discussion at its November meeting and on the advice of the IGBC, the IBC instructed an expanded Working Group to continue its work on cloning by examining three issues: a the ethical impact of terminology b dissemination activities and c regulation of human reproductive cloning including by moratorium. On options for regulation, it found that a more robust instrument on human reproductive cloning than existed currently was needed, such as an international convention or moratorium UNESCO, b : 1 and 6.

Glover J. Oxford : Clarendon Press , From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice. Philosophical arguments for and against human reproductive cloning. Bioethics ; 17 : — Synthetic biology and ethics: past, present, and future. Camb Q Healthc Ethics ; 26 : — Doctrines and dimensions of justice: their historical backgrounds and ideological underpinnings. Camb Q Healthc Ethics ; 27 : — American principles, European values, and the mezzanine rules of ethical genetic data banking.

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