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Under separate cover, we are sending a copy of Human Cloning and Human Dignity, the Report of the President's Council on Bioethics, chaired by Dr. Leon Kass, on which we have the honor to serve. The Report recommends (unanimously) a ban on cloning for the purpose of baby-making and (by a vote of 10-7) a four year moratorium on cloning for biomedical research. Please note that though seven of the seventeen members of the Council support cloning for biomedical research (subject to strict federal regulations), none indicated support for the implantation and gestation of cloned embryos for the purpose of harvesting cadaveric fetal tissues or organs.Ü Ü PCBE: Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry -- ...
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We write to express our grave concern about legislation currently pending in New Jersey (Senate Bill 1909/Assembly Bill 2840) to authorize human cloning and the harvesting and use of body parts of cloned humans in the embryonic and fetal stages of development. This legislation, if enacted, threatens to make New Jersey a haven for unethical medical practices, including the macabre practice of human fetal farming. Ü Ü
The Law of Universal Conscience by Professor Diane Orentlicher Diane F. Orentlicher is a Professor of Law at the Washington College of Law, American University, where she is also Director of the War Crimes Research Office. This paper was presented at the Committee on Conscience conference Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity: Early Warning and Prevention on December 9, 1998, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. EXCERPTS
The subject about which I have been asked to speak-- the law of crimes against humanity and genocide-- is, in a very real sense, the law of universal conscience. Both the development and enforcement of this law have depended above all on the determined commitment of communities of conscience. Those communities were given a powerful new voice several years ago when the United States Holocaust Memorial Council created its Committee on Conscience "to alert the national conscience, influence policy makers, and stimulate worldwide action to confront and work to halt acts of genocide or related crimes against humanity." The Law of Conscience: Transforming the Realm of Politics
The most important legal foundation for the legal proceedings against General Pinochet was established through the Nuremberg and other postwar prosecutions of Nazi war criminals for crimes against humanity, as well as more recent legal developments that build upon the Nuremberg legacy.... It is commonplace to observe that states lack the political will-- or at least too often lack sufficient will-- to enforce the universal code of conscience.
In short, not only is enforcement of the law of conscience profoundly affected by the prevailing political environment, but the law itself is deeply concerned with questions relating to the legitimate exercise of political authority. Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide: The Legal Regime
First, a legal-- though not highly technical-- definition. While crimes against humanity have been defined somewhat differently in various international instruments, they in essence comprise inhumane acts such as murder, torture, enslavement and persecution committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population. Although linked to interstate war in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal, crimes against humanity no longer must be connected to armed conflict, whether international or internal.
Genocide is an international crime in its own right, and is also considered the most serious crime against humanity. The authoritative definition of genocide is the one set forth in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which defines genocide as one of five types of act committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such. The acts that constitute genocide when committed with this intent are generally directed at the physical destruction of the group. Crimes Against Humanity
Crimes against humanity were first recognized in positive international law in the Nuremberg Charter, which was adopted by the four Allied Powers on August 8, 1945.
The political impetus was essentially a moral impulse. In the course of the second World War it became clear that some of the worst atrocities of Hitler’s Germany did not fall within the province of classical war crimes. Yet as the Allies turned their thoughts to the question of how to punish Nazi criminals once the war was over, it soon became plain that it would be intolerable not to address these atrocities. In 1944 Henry Stimson, the United States Secretary of War, asked Colonel Murray Bernays, then head of the Special Projects Office of the Defense Department, to prepare a memorandum on how to punish Nazi criminals once the war was over. In his memorandum, Bernays observed that many of the worst Nazi practices could not be classified as war crimes, and remarked that "to let these brutalities go unpunished will leave millions of persons frustrated and disillusioned." Further, he observed, both the United States and United Kingdom were under pressure from various Jewish organizations to ensure that all such atrocities-- not just those committed against Jews-- should be punished.
Article 6( c) of the Nuremberg Charter gave the Tribunal jurisdiction over crimes against humanity, namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated. Several aspects of this provision represented a profound rupture with international law’s longstanding deference to what had been regarded the province of sovereign prerogative. First, the phrase "against any civilian population" would include Germans who suffered inhumane acts at the hands of German authorities. Further, the phrase "before or during the war" seemed to signify that the Nuremberg tribunal could concern itself with a government’s treatment of its own citizens even in peacetime, at least in some circumstances. That it could do so "whether or not" the conduct was "in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated" represented yet another major encroachment on sovereign authority. It seemed as though international society had been so deeply shaken by Hitler’s atrocities that it could no longer bear to respect the principles of law that it had long ago shaped.
In his 1946 article on crimes against humanity, Egon Schwelb observed that the word "‘ humanity’ has at least two different meanings, the one connotating [sic] the human race or mankind as a whole, and the other, humaneness, i. e. a certain quality of behaviour."
The abhorrent crimes defined in this Law are not crimes under Israel [sic] law alone. These crimes, which struck at the whole of mankind and shocked the conscience of nations, are grave offences against the law of nations itself . Genocide
The third major transformation in the postwar law concerning crimes against humanity involves the emergence and crystallization of the crime of genocide. The term "genocide" does not appear in the Nuremberg Charter, though it had already been coined by Raphael Lemkin. In his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin argued for recognition of the international crime of genocide to reflect the peculiar nature of Hitler’s crimes. "New conceptions require new terms," Lemkin wrote, and so he proposed the term "genocide"-- made from the Greek word "genos," meaning race or tribe, and the Latin "cide," meaning killing— to connote "the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group."
The adoption of this convention 50 years ago today was a magnificent triumph for Raphael Lemkin and others who had campaigned for a treaty recognizing that genocide is an international crime-- whether committed in time of peace or in time of war-- and requiring States Parties to prevent the crime and, where they fail to prevent, to punish those who bear criminal responsibility.
Statement - On Human Embryos and Stem Cell Research...
One of the great hallmarks of American law has been its solicitous protection of the lives of individuals, especially the vulnerable. ...–one of the great achievements of the modern world–is founded on the conviction that when the dignity of one human being is assaulted, all of us are threatened.
Current law against funding research in which human embryos are harmed and destroyed reflects well-established national and international legal and ethical norms against the misuse of any human being for research purposes. Since 1975, those norms have been applied to unborn children at every stage of development in the womb, and since 1995 they have been applied to the human embryo outside the womb as well. The existing law on human embryonic research is a reflection of universally accepted principles governing experiments on human subjects–principles reflected in the Nuremberg Code, the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and many other statements. Accordingly, members of the human species who cannot give informed consent for research should not be the subjects of an experiment unless they personally may benefit from it or the experiment carries no significant risk of harming them.
...the Supreme Court has never prevented the government from protecting prenatal life outside the abortion context, and public sentiment also seems even more opposed to government funding of embryo experimentation than to the funding of abortion. The laws of a number of states–including Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Utah–specifically protect embryonic human beings outside the womb. Most of these provisions prohibit experiments on embryos outside the womb.
I just visited the only former abortion mill turned Memorial in the country: National American Holocaust Memorial in Baton Rouge, LA. 30,000 babies died there from 1986 to 1994. It reopened May 12, 1994 as the only Holocaust Memorial of it's kind in the United States. It is also a center of Christian Pro-Life activity, providing services to help women in crisis pregnancies.
The tables and killing equipment are there just like the day it closed. There is blood on the floor in one room, all the tools of death sitting (quitely).
Fr. Frank Pavone, Priests For Life, said the second Mass there after it became the Memorial. There are pictures of Father Frank standing in the former execution rooms holding some of the equipment! Unbelievable. I felt like I was walking in a nightmare.
America! You have become deadlier than Nazi Germany and Stalins' Russia combined (42,000,000+ million aborted America citizens since 1973, growing daily) But you just keep pushing your baskets through Wal-Mart like: "nuthin's happening-dude" we're the land of Liberty, everything is just fine.
6 posted on 01/10/2003 9:32 PM CST by cpforlife.org