Description
In 2020-21, four international organisations – the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the World Medical Association (WMA) – published reports and/or standards on genome editing (also called gene editing), the process by which specific parts of an organism’s DNA is altered. The WMA, an international organization representing physicians which sits outside the UN, released the “WMA Statement on Human Genome Editing” in October 2020, which includes recommendations for governments. In May 2021, the International Society for Stem Cell Research updated its “Guidelines for Stem Cell Research and Clinical Translation”, to include guidance on genome editing. In July 2021, the WHO published “Human Genome Editing: A Framework for Governance”, providing advice and recommendations on governance mechanisms at institutional, national, regional and global levels. In December 2021, UNESCO issued the “Report of the International Bioethics Committee (IBC) on the Principle of Protecting Future Generations”. The report supports the WHO Framework, whilst also calling for the development of international law to prohibit heritable genome editing. This paper will compare and contrast the development, content and purpose of these four documents. It will seek to determine how far they complement or compete with each other in terms of provisions for governance and whether, collectively, they provide a robust framework for the global governance of genome editing.
