THE ABSENCE of regulation of biomedicine in Ireland means there are questions over the legality of various avenues of scientific research, the Director of Public Prosecutions has said.
James Hamilton added that there was no clear prohibition in Irish law on techniques such as reproductive cloning.
Mr Hamilton was speaking at Trinity College Dublin last night on the subject of Freedom of Expression and Inquiry. It was the first in the Mackey series of lectures organised by the Trinity Long Room Hub in conjunction with the Edward Worth Library, the National Library of Ireland, UCD and the Health Service Executive.
Mr Hamilton said the Constitution provided for the right to freedom of expression of convictions and opinions, but the qualifications on this right meant the constitutional protection of freedom of expression was relatively weak compared to the European Convention on Human Rights.
The Constitution Review Group, which reported in 1996 and of which Mr Hamilton was a member, recommended major changes to the guarantee of freedom of expression, including that it should not be subject to the test of “public order and morality and the authority of the State”, as this was too all-embracing. The group recommended its replacement with a qualification based on the European convention.
It also proposed removing the constitutional offences of the publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious or indecent material. However, 13 years on, these recommendations have not been implemented, he said.
The Constitution does not contain any guarantee of freedom of scientific research or inquiry. There was no such protection for freedom of research in the European convention either, he said, and it was weaker in UN instruments than the protection for freedom of expression. Most European countries with constitutions dating before 1948 did not have such protection, though it features in more recent constitutions.
However, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights stated that the arts and scientific research should be free of constraint, and this was recognised in the Lisbon Treaty. This would now be interpreted and applied by the European Court of Justice, he said.
Mr Hamilton pointed out that in the wake of Nazi experiments on humans, attempts were made to formulate ethical principles under which such research may be carried out. These are contained in the non-binding Unesco Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, and in the Council of Europe Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and the Dignity of the Human Being (the Oviedo Convention).
Ireland had not signed up to the Oviedo Convention because, as then minister of state Ivor Callely had explained to the Seanad, “there are difficulties with a number of articles that have implications for the destruction of human embryos”, though he did not specify which articles, Mr Hamilton said. Mr Callely also referred to the work of the Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction.
“Now that we have the benefit of detailed work from this commission as well as the advice of the Irish Council for Bioethics it is important that progress should be made towards the implementation of the Oviedo Convention, if necessary with reservations,” Mr Hamilton said.