NEW YORK, December 9, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The United Nations General Assembly agreed today to revisit the cloning issue a year earlier than agreed on by the organization’s legal committee in a highly controversial vote last month. Costa Rica had been pressing again for a vote on a motion to have all human cloning prohibited pending the adoption of an international convention, however, reports indicate that there were not sufficient votes among the 191 state-members to pass the measure. A one-year delay was agreed to by the Assembly without a vote. The issue will thus be debated again next September. AP reports that unnamed diplomats were surprised that the U.S. did not lobby in favour of the latest proposal by Costa Rica. The proposal would have required countries to “prohibit any research, experiment, development or application in their territories or areas under their jurisdiction or control of any technique aimed at human cloning” until a UN convention on the matter was passed. The original Costa Rican resolution, backed by the United States and over 60 countries intended to ban all human cloning while an alternative proposal pushed by Britain, Russia, China, Japan, Belgium, France and Germany wanted to permit “therapeutic cloning”. The term, however is a misnomer since by “therapeutic cloning” is meant the allowance of human cloning as long as the human beings created by the procedure would not be allowed to be born alive, thus the embryonic children created would be available to scientists to be experimented on.
See the AP coverage from CBS news: https://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/12/09/tech/main587616.shtml