This reflects an earlier proposal submitted by the country to the UN and presented last year. « Human cloning, whether on an experimental basis, as part of fertility treatments or preimplantation genetic diagnosis, for tissue transplantation or for other purposes, is morally repugnant, unethical and contrary to respect for the person and constitutes a serious violation of fundamental human rights, » reads a draft resolution tabled by Bruno Stagno. Permanent Representative of Costa Rica to the United Nations, with Secretary-General Kofi Annan on 2 April 2003. The strong pressure exerted by the US government to ban the cloning of research has surprised some at the United Nations, particularly because there is no national consensus on the issue. At the IGBC meeting in September 2011, the outgoing President of the IBC reported on the activities of his Committee. With regard to the discussion on cloning, he explained that, although some members wished to vote on the adoption of the draft declaration of the Working Group, he had refused to do so because the IBC had always worked by consensus in the past. He also expressed his belief that consensus on a ban will always be impossible, as it is essentially a philosophy rather than a science on the status of the early embryo. IGBC delegations were largely in agreement, with the United States, Austria and Denmark reiterating the prediction of IBC members that further efforts to reach agreement on regulation would be fruitless (personal remarks, Seventh IGBC meeting, September 2011). The official conclusions of the meeting highlighted the continued importance of the issue, but also the lack of consensus between the two States and the members of the IBC.
Therefore, the IGBC simply called on UNESCO to « monitor developments in this field in order to anticipate emerging ethical challenges » (UNESCO, 2011a:3). Subsequently, the IBC programme of work 2012-2013 was left to the cloning of follow-up by some IBC members, who in turn had to report to the Committee and thus to the Director-General of UNESCO (UNESCO, 2016f) on significant developments in this field. « They are starting to lose their enthusiasm for [the idea of a UN convention], » a UN source said of the British. « It`s [the way some countries are trying to ban cloning] that`s bad in their eyes. » Although this clone was just a sheep, the discussion immediately turned to cloned humans: cloned custom babies and armies of cloned warrior slaves. Governments around the world had rushed to ban human cloning or had declared that they had already banned human cloning, a process that had never been carried out or even tried. Hofferberth (2015: 616) criticizes the assumption that « global problems are manageable and solutions achievable if actors do not unite and work together to solve them. » As noted above, some members of the IBC and IGBC felt that the reason why they had not been able to reach consensus during the first 4 years of the debate on human cloning (2008-2011) was the inherently intractable nature of the problem itself. However, other controversial areas, such as business and human rights, have not proved immune to recent efforts to converge policies and standards (Ruggie, 2014: 6). Thus, another possible explanation for the failure is that the legal and organizational structures that guided the boards were not adapted to consensual decisions. In the early 2000s, the United Nations General Assembly found that the old model of negotiating state treaties for human cloning did not work when it could not agree on a convention and instead chose a non-binding declaration. UNESCO`s experience is similar, although it was not the negotiations on the content of the treaty that failed, but the previous phase of deciding whether or not to attempt to draft a treaty.
When UNESCO raised the possibility of a convention in 2008, it resisted the emerging trend within global governance towards voluntary rather than binding regulation combined with capacity building. Germany, for example, which in 2001 was among the states that initially endorsed the idea of a convention on human cloning at the United Nations, is now looking for other, less rigid ways to achieve the objectives of a proposed treaty (Pauwelyn et al., 2014: 739). Within UNESCO, as in other intergovernmental organizations, it is the States that make the final decisions, so even if the IBC (composed of independent experts) had continued to insist on the desirability of a convention in 2011, it would only have had the power to recommend to Member States to move the idea forward. Since the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1997, the world has had to face the serious prospect that human cloning might indeed be possible.