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Discussion Of U.N. Treaty On Human Cloning Delayed Two Years
Thursday, November 6, 2003

UNITED NATIONS - Deeply divided over the question of human cloning, the General Assembly's Legal Committee voted this morning to delay discussion of a treaty banning human cloning for two years. Reflecting the polarized debate, the motion to delay was adopted 80-79, with 15 abstentions.

Iran, acting on behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, introduced the motion to remove the item from the U.N. agenda until the 2005 General Assembly session. The committee is trying to devise a mandate for negotiating a treaty banning cloning. There is unanimity that reproductive cloning - the cloning of a human to produce another human - should be unequivocally prohibited. The crux of the debate has been on therapeutic cloning - cloning embryos for scientific and medical research including stem cell research.

One side, led by the United States and the Vatican, wants a total ban on human cloning, while the other side, led by France and Germany, would permit therapeutic cloning.

The committee had before it two competing draft resolutions reflecting those two sides. Adopting the Iranian motion prevented a vote on either draft.

"I think the desire for delay is evidence of the realization that the countries that are supporting only a partial ban realize that their position is eroding," said U.S. Deputy Ambassador James Cunningham. He said there were at least 100 countries supporting the U.S. position. If there had been a vote, "it would have been a significant defeat for their position," he added.

The Legal Committee traditionally attempts to take decisions by consensus (Jim Wurst, U.N. Wire, Nov. 6).

Approximately 23 countries support the French-German position, including Belgium, China, Japan and the United Kingdom. They want to leave the decision of whether to allow cloning for research and medical purposes to individual countries. The United States argues that scientists already have enough stem cell material for research on diseases and that therapeutic cloning is therefore not necessary (Edith Lederer, Associated Press/Yahoo! News, Nov. 6).

The New York Times said in an editorial yesterday that what the Bush administration was pursuing in its resolution on cloning is "a position more extreme than it has been able to sell" in the United States.

General Assembly "member states would be wise to ignore the American campaign and instead chart a course that would allow therapeutic cloning," it said. "This is no time to snuff out promising medical research by imposing rigid moral restraints that are far from universally accepted," it added (New York Times, Nov. 5).