Mathaba.Net News -- Human Cloning, Bioethics, Priorities and Perspectives for Africa

Mathaba.Net News -- Human Cloning, Bioethics, Priorities and Perspectives for Africa :

"The need for African ethical guidelines covering all issues raised in the field of Bioethics is increasingly felt by specialists and decision-makers as well as by civil society as it is also the case at the level of international community. In this respect, the �Declaration on Science and the Use of Scientific Knowledge� and the �Science Agenda � Framework for Action�, adopted in 1999 in Budapest, highlighted the ethical dimension of the present-day development of science and technology."

"Certain key texts, such as the Hippocratic Oath and other medical traditions, have defined some of the principles and forged the corresponding concepts on which bioethics is predicated. However, modern bioethics is indisputably founded on the pedestal of the values enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Other texts of different legal force have established rules for the protection of persons in the wide field of biomedicine. These include the principles of Nuremberg adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1947, the Declaration of Helsinki (1964) of the World Medical Association (WMA) – some of whose features are spelled out in greater detail in the Declarations of Tokyo (1975), Venice (1983) and Hong Kong (1989) – and the International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research Involving Human Subjects (1992) prepared and recently revised by the Council for International Organisations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS). Finally, given the magnitude of the ethical issues raised by genetics and thanks to the political will expressed by the international community, UNESCO has contributed to the formulation of fundamental principles in bioethics through the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, which was adopted unanimously and by acclamation by the General Conference in 1997 and endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1998."

Mathaba.Net/African Union News; December 8, 2004.