AFTER three years of agonising and international rancour, the quest for a convention banning human cloning ended in failure. Last week, UN delegates quietly buried the idea, at least for now.
Instead, member states backed an Italian plan to draft a political declaration on human cloning, a document with zero legal clout. 鈥淚t鈥檚 basically a political face-saver,鈥� said a source close to the negotiations. 鈥淵ou can interpret it how you like.鈥�
UN members could have simply signed up to a ban on cloned babies, but the rot set in when an alliance of countries led by the Catholic nations and the US decided that they wanted to ban medical applications too, so-called 鈥渢herapeutic cloning鈥�. The UK argued that a convention should ban the creation of cloned babies but let countries decide for themselves on the question of therapeutic cloning.
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Neither side has budged since. Now everyone has finally accepted the inevitable, that a convention is impossible at present.
