UN clone talks bog down

NEW YORK — A United Nations working group tasked with establishing a "negotiating mandate" for a treaty to ban human reproductive cloning ended its week-long session Friday September 27 having concluded only that more discussions are needed. The group's talks stalled because of fundamental disagreements over whether the proposed convention should be limited to reproductive cloning, or should address all applications that involve cloning human embryos.

"Everybody's in favor of banning reproductive cloning, so there is support for this, but for some states this is not enough," explained Ambassador Peter Tomka of Slovakia, chair of the UN cloning committee. "They would like to have other kinds of cloning involving embryos banned," he told The Scientist, "while some states which came with the idea of just banning reproductive cloning agree that the committee should also deal with other types, but not in one instrument. And others think it should be left for national governments to deal with."

The Ad Hoc Committee on an International Convention against the Reproductive Cloning of Human Beings was created by a General Assembly resolution in December 2001, which called reproductive cloning an "attack on the human dignity of the individual." The committee met once in February of this year, to hear scientific and ethical testimony from invited experts. The group's primary task last week was to define the parameters of a UN convention against reproductive cloning and, had they accomplished that, the next step would have been to negotiate a draft of the treaty itself.

Such a convention would be the UN's first to specifically address a bioethics issue, according to George Annas, chair of the Health Law department at Boston University's School of Public Health. Once adopted by a General Assembly vote, the treaty text would have to be signed by individual nations and then ratified by their governments. However, the convention would establish only a legal minimum of sorts, and would not prevent countries from enacting more conservative laws of their own, according to Tomka.

But the working group's formal talks ended in an impasse last week with a contingent including delegates from the United States, Spain, the Philippines, and the Holy See, insisting that any separation between cloning for reproduction and cloning for research or therapeutic purposes is an artificial one.

"The United States wants a legally binding ban on all forms of human cloning," said Richard Skinner, a spokesman for the US mission to the UN, "and the position is going to continue to be that." Because negotiations are likely to continue, he declined to further elaborate the US view.

The idea of a reproductive cloning convention was first proposed in August 2001 by France and Germany, whose committee delegates continue to favor a treaty addressing only reproductive cloning. The United Kingdom, Russia, China, Japan, and Brazil are also among supporters of a narrow focus on cloning for reproduction — a ban on which could be quickly and easily passed by the General Assembly, advocates believe. In contrast, taking on the issue of therapeutic cloning is seen as a recipe for protracted negotiations. A broader treaty would have "no chance of getting out of this committee," Annas believes. "They've either got to do reproductive only, or go back to the General Assembly."

The cloning committee's working group concluded its session Friday by recommending that discussions continue under the auspices of the General Assembly's legal organ, known as the Sixth Committee. "Since the Sixth Committee has not yet completed its work, we still have time to explore compromise, but it seems to be a difficult issue," said Tomka.

The Sixth Committee will formally consider the working group's report on October 17–18, and can resolve to reconvene the cloning committee to try again to reach agreement on how much of the controversy over cloning the UN should attempt to tackle.