Developing Models for Implementation of UNESCO Bioethical Instruments

Center for Ethics and Law in Biomedicine (CELAB) received a UNESCO grant for developing models for implementation of UNESCO Bioethical Instruments. With this project, CELAB sought to contribute to the increasing international awareness of the existence of these UNESCO declarations. We believe that reflections on and interpretations of these documents should be an integral part of ethics education, policymaking, national legislation and international research and that translating these documents into the official languages of the Member States is one of the best ways to spread the idea of bioethical thinking and disseminate the results of policy-making at UNESCO.

Therefore our goal was to arrange authoritative and accessible translations of the three UNESCO declarations on bioethics: the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights (1997), the International Declaration on Human Genetic Data (2003) and the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (2005). The importance of these translations is that this is the first time that Czech, Croatian, Italian, Hungarianand Serbian readers can read in their mother tongue a compilation of the three main international declarations drawn up and adopted in the field of bioethics, recognized by most states in the world. The booklets have been sent out for free and without any commitment to decision makers, ministries, medical universities, faculties of law, libraries and ethical committees. Those involved in this project hope that the translations will serve as practical tools to promote the implementation of the key UNESCO instruments on bioethics.