The Center for Public Integrity
2 June, 2004
A Human Rights Issue
In Europe, nations ban reproductive cloning, but allow research to continue
By M. Asif Ismail
WASHINGTON, June 2, 2004 – As in much of the rest of the world,
the 1997 announcement of the birth of Dolly the sheep, the first
mammal cloned from an adult cell, forced Europe’s legislators,
bioethicists and religious leaders to deal with the topic of human
cloning. When Italian fertility expert Severino Antinori, along with
American physiologist Panayiotis Zavos, declared, the next year, that
they would help infertile couples to have children through cloning,
the continent’s public policy makers responded quickly.
The 45-member Council of Europe, the oldest multilateral political
organization on the continent, outlawed “[a]ny intervention seeking
to create a human being genetically identical to another human being”
by amending its Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine.
The additional protocol to the treaty noted that such an action
was necessitated by “scientific developments in the field of mammal
cloning, particularly through embryo splitting and nuclear transfer.”
Great Britain, whose biotech industry is the largest in Europe, is
one of the many countries to adopt legislation on the issue. “The
Human Reproductive Cloning Act,” enacted in 2001, mandates up to
10 years of prison and an unlimited fine, if convicted of creating
human clones. At the same time, the law allows research on cloning for
therapeutic purposes with strict regulation. The Human Fertilisation
and Embryology Authority regulates embryo research in the country.
In the other continental biotech giant, Germany, all embryo research
is banned.
Other Western European countries that prohibited reproductive
cloning include Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy,
the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
“Issues of human genetics and bioethics in Europe have been widely
accepted as human rights issues concerning human dignity and
fundamental freedoms of the citizens,” according to Emilia Ianeva,
director of the Center for Human Rights at California State University,
Hayward.
About half of the countries in Central and Eastern Europe and former
Soviet republics in the Caucasus have ratified the Protocol on the
Prohibition of Cloning Human Beings. “Notable non-signatories are
Russia, Serbia and Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Armenia
and Azerbaijan, making them possible places of choice for companies
that would like to do human genetic engineering, including cloning,
shielded from legal regulations,” Ianeva wrote in a paper published
last year.
Russia, however, adopted a five-year moratorium on human reproductive
cloning, which is in force until 2007. The Czech Republic, Lithuania,
Romania and Slovakia have also banned reproductive cloning and have
ratified the protocol.
On the issue of research cloning, the political climate differs from
country to country. While Switzerland is against creation of cloned
embryos, and France has proposed a ban, Britain permits it.
Ian Wilmut, who cloned Dolly, recently told the British media that he
would clone human embryos for research. The scientist’s application
will be the first submitted to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology
Authority, according to news agency PA News. “He wants to study what
goes wrong in the nerve cells of patients suffering from motor neuron
disease,” the agency reported.
Europe has the finest biotech infrastructure outside of the United
States. There are 96 publicly traded biotech companies in Europe,
compared to 314 in the United States, William Powlett Smith, who
heads of Ernst & Young’s U.K. Health Sciences Group, told the Center
for Public Integrity. However, there are more private companies in
Europe than in the United States, according to Smith.