ADF to European Parliament: UK ‘Three-Parent Embryo’ Legislation Illegal
By Global Dispatch,
Global Dispatch
| 02. 13. 2015
The so-called “three-parent embryo” legislation that the United Kingdom’s House of Commons passed Feb. 3 likely breaches a European Union directive to which the UK is obligated. That’s the conclusion of a legal memo Alliance Defending Freedom provided Thursday to the European Parliament at the request of several MEPs.
“Politicians should not be allowed to skirt the law just because they want to push through legislation that might otherwise receive appropriate scrutiny,” said ADF Legal Counsel Robert Clarke, who is also a barrister admitted to the Bar of England and Wales. “It’s quite clear that the UK cannot simply bypass its obligations under Article 9 of the European Union’s Clinical Trials Directive, which prohibits the government from legislating anything that alters the human germ line.”
British MPs in the House of Commons voted to pass the Human Fertilisation and Embryology (Mitochondrial Donation) Regulations of 2015 with 382 votes for and 128 against. The legislation next goes to the House of Lords for a vote and could come into force as early as October 2015 if passed there.
The UK regulations...
Related Articles
By Ed Cara, Gizmodo | 06.22.2025
In late May, several scientific organizations, including the International Society for Cell and Gene Therapy (ISCT), banded together to call for a 10-year moratorium on using CRISPR and related technologies to pursue human heritable germline editing. The declaration also outlined...
By Darren Incorvaia, Fierce Biotech | 05.28.2025
An international group of gene editing leaders has put out a call for a 10-year ban on heritable human genome editing (HHGE), extending a moratorium that was first proposed in the fallout of a Chinese researcher’s widely decried use of...
Last week, May 21–23, a broad range of experts gathered in Boston to discuss the future of powerful biotechnologies with the potential to change what it means to be human. The fourth in a series of international Summits on human genome editing, this event was organized by the Global Observatory for Genome Editing, which “seeks to expand the range of questions arising at the frontiers of emerging biotechnologies … and fosters international, interdisciplinary, and cross-sectoral dialogue.” Like previous Summits...
By Hannah Devlin, The Guardian | 05.23.2025
The sperm of a man carrying a rare cancer-causing mutation was used to conceive at least 67 children, 10 of whom have since been diagnosed with cancer, in a case that has highlighted concerns about the lack of internationally agreed...
