Russian parliament approves bill to extend ban on human cloning

MOSCOW, March 17, 2010, (RIA Novosti)

The upper house of the Russian parliament, the Federation Council, approved on Wednesday a government bill to extend a ban on human cloning.

The bill has already been approved by the lower house, the State Duma, but is yet to be signed into law by President Dmitry Medvedev.

The draft says that the ban on human cloning will continue in Russia until the adoption of new legislation regulating the cloning process.

The original 2002 law does not prohibit the cloning of cells and organisms for scientific and research purposes, human organs for transplantation or the cloning of animals.

Human cloning has been a subject of debate since the 1960s. Although technology for human cloning remains incomplete, its advocates have already faced a number of legal, aesthetic and religious challenges.

The chairman of the Federation Council social policy committee, Valentina Petrenko, said a ban on human cloning has already been introduced in most of the world's leading countries.

Human cloning is formally permitted in the U.S. and Britain. The later became the first country to legalize the cloning of human embryos for stem cell research in 2001.

Therapeutic cloning, which involves the production of stem cells from embryos, was permitted in the U.S. a few days after Barack Obama's inauguration as president. The law on this type of cloning requires embryos to be destroyed within 14 days. Obama, however, ruled out reproductive cloning, which he called "dangerous" and "profoundly wrong." It "has no place in our society or any society", he said.

Russia's moratorium on human cloning expired on June 23, 2007.

Fair Use Notice

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.