UN Panel Opposes All Forms of Human Cloning

The committee voted 71 to 35 with 43 abstentions in favor of the proposal put forward by Honduras and backed by Washington, reported Reuters.

The declaration called on UN members to adopt urgent legislation outlawing all cloning practices “as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life.”

The measure now goes to the full 191-nation assembly.

The vote capped four years of deliberations on a global ban on the cloning of human beings.

The discussions began with a 2001 proposal to draft a binding global treaty banning human cloning, which probably now will not occur.

Opponents of the measure, like Britain, Belgium and Singapore, said the text would have no impact on their practice of co-called therapeutic stem cell research.

At the heart of the debate was medical research relying on therapeutic cloning, in which human embryos are cloned to obtain the cells used in the studies and are later discarded.

Many scientists say the technique holds out the hope of a cure for some 100 million people with such conditions as Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes and spinal cord injuries.

But the United States, Costa Rica and other governments have argued that they view this type of research, for whatever purpose, as the taking of human life.

With the support of President George Bush, the US House of Representatives voted in 2001 to ban human cloning by a vote of 265-162.

Islam completely prohibits human cloning. (Click here to read Islam’s stances on animal and human cloning).

Welcomed

“This is a powerful message to the world that this morally questionable procedure is outside the bounds of acceptable experimentation,” Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, one of the main NGOs involved in the negotiation, said in a statement e-mailed to IslamOnline.net.

“By adopting this declaration, the international community is united in condemning all human cloning as exploitative and unethical. This should encourage similar bans in legislatures around the world including in the US Senate,” said Ruse.

C-FAM is a non-profit organization designed to serve the needs of United Nations delegates, extra-governmental and non-governmental organizations, missions and consulates.

It intends to fulfill an educational need to inform the public at large regarding family and human rights issues.

The same position was echoed by a coalition of US groups opposed to abortion rights.

“This declaration represents a significant step forward in advancing respect for human life,” Reuters quoted the coalition as saying.

“Cloning opponents welcomed the UN’s resolution and look forward to member-states fulfilling their international obligations.”

Non-binding

Nonetheless, the declaration drew fire from pro-cloning countries, such as Britain.

“This is a weak, non-binding political statement. The number of states that failed to support it is greater than the number that backed it,” said British UN Ambassador, Emyr Jones Parry.

“We have lost the opportunity for an international ban on the abhorrent prospect of reproductive cloning because of the intransigence of states whose action serves only to hold back medical research”, he argued.

Singaporean Ambassador Vanu Gopala Menon, who also voted against the declaration regretted that a common objective of prohibiting human cloning “was hijacked in a misguided bid to widen this ban to include important research.”

Before adopting the text, the assembly’s legal committee rejected amendments by Belgium that would have made the declaration more acceptable to stem cell research supporters.

Countries were divided mainly over whether to protect “human life” or the “human being.”

Costa Rica, Uganda, the United States and others who sought to ban all forms of human cloning, supported “human life.”

Countries including Belgium, Singapore and the United Kingdom, who wanted to ban only cloning that would result in born human beings, insisted on protecting the “human being,” which according to some international legal documents would protect only those already born.