h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Anybody want to talk about the E.U. ? This forum was prompted by topic drift over at http://www.h2g2.com/F19585?thread=86212&post=822190 (post 365 onwards). For those that do not know about the European Union you can find out more at there web-site [URL removed by moderator] For those that are interested here are some links to the various E.U. intuitions. Council Of Ministers: [URL removed by moderator] Commission: [URL removed by moderator] E.U. Parliament: [URL removed by moderator] Court of Justice: [URL removed by moderator] Central Bank[URL removed by moderator] You can also find the E.U.'s bill of rights at [URL removed by moderator] and finally for he links you find out about European policing at [URL removed by moderator] As for myself, I am pro-European and hope & expect to see a Federated Europe within my lifetime. Comments ?

I just read through the EU bill of rights, and found it very interesting. Particularly these points:

There is an explicit right to 'found a family' written in gender neutral terms. This could be implied as a message to member countries to allow gay marriage, gay civil unions, and/or adoption by gay couples. Do all the member countries agree with this concept already, or is it a stretch?

There is a right to voice your 'conscientious object' -- but this is limited by 'national laws.' Doesn't that tend to negate the right. I mean, you can object to a country's government only if the government's laws allow you to.

Cloning is specifically prohibited. What happens when other countries like the US began to utilize cloning? Have the charter founders considered this possibility? And what exactly does one do with an illegally cloned person?

Those criticisms aside, I did appreciate the specific workers' rights, children's rights, and the right to withold one's own personal information from profit-seeking companies. These are all great steps forward!

Sorry. The third paragraph should have read 'conscientious objection' rather than 'conscientious object.' I can only guess that the latter is a Dada-inspired term for found objects.

Fragilis I will try to give you some answers, but as this is all fairly new stuff in Europe for some questions there will be no answers until case law comes into being.

'There is an explicit right to 'found a family' written in gender neutral terms. This could be implied as a message to member countries to allow gay marriage, gay civil unions, and/or adoption by gay couples. Do all the member countries agree with this concept already, or is it a stretch?'
I don't think so and I would expect test cases to be brought on this in countries where any of these actions are illegal or not available (at the moment in the UK there is no recognized form of legal marriage available to gay couples but gay adoption is allowed).
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'There is a right to voice your 'conscientious objection' -- but this is limited by 'national laws.' Doesn't that tend to negate the right. I mean, you can object to a country's government only if the government's laws allow you to.'
Yes, true but the ultimate right of appeal is to a European Court not a national one, so it will be a international panel of Judges that will ultimately decide on the fairness of a nations laws.
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'Cloning is specifically prohibited. What happens when other countries like the US began to utilize cloning? Have the charter founders considered this possibility? And what exactly does one do with an illegally cloned person?'
Surly a person is a person with the same basic rights however the person came into being ?
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I am glad that overall, you thought it a good idea.

Thanks for answering, Happy Dude.

I still have a question on cloning, though. You said.

'Surly a person is a person with the same basic rights however the person came into being ?'

In general, I would agree with you. But the problem with cloning is that a company could theoretically clone people for its own purposes. Presumably, they would use some DNA from one or more real-life persons. Who, then, is considered the child's parents? Under the EU bill of rights, this child has the right to keep in contact with its 'parents.'

In general, I find laws against cloning to be very odd when cloning of humans does not currently exist. They seem reactionary and not particularly well thought out, in my opinion. And I guess the EU's is no exception, in my mind.

Fragilis, how do you know cloning of humans does not exist? I am of the opinion that there's a high probability that it has already been done in secret in some lab. It is perfectly possible, technology wise. And I think the temptation to clone a human is so great that as soon as it was practically feasible somebody would have done it. As I understand the technology it has been practically feasible for a few years now. So there could be a number of cloned babies alive somewhere today, even though not "officially".

Pillow, is very unlikely to have been done & the possibility is not 'perfectly possible' the cloning of large mammals is very much cutting edge stuff.

Fragilis, I agree the law dose touch on paranoia but I do feel regulation of some sort is necessary in this area.

I disagree. For one thing, very few scientists would willingly remain silent after having cloned a human being. Those who are not enamored of the fame they would instantly receive would feel an ethical obligation to disclose the discovery to the rest of the scientific community. I don't feel cloning is something that could be done by a hobbyist or a meddling government agency alone. The task requires someone with a very high degree of education, a genius at researching past efforts, and likely a high respect for the scientific theory and the processes of disclosure.

There are also a few technical reasons why I believe humans have not been cloned yet. The first issue is the self-obvious one. We don't really know how to clone any animal properly yet, so human cloning would take a real breakthrough. In the rare cases where cloning has worked, the resulting 'child' was doomed to an abnornally short life span. And even those cases involved animals more amenable to cloning than humans are.

The second issue is that today's version of cloning requires that a mother of the same or a related species carry the fetus. Using human women for more than a couple of clones would tend to draw attention to one's research since you would need doctors, equipment, and facilities not usually given to scientists. And, of course, the women and the doctors must be kept silent in addition to the scientists and lab workers in the case. A procedure to clone humans would be sufficiently different from anything like else that you could fool neither doctor nor mother about what was really going on.

It is also unlikely that apes or other monkeys could carry humans to term successfully. Human babies tend to be very large at birth (especially their skulls) compared to other primates. Chances of cross-species carriage are 50 to 1 at best, even with species that are extremely similar. With apes, you would need hundreds or more likely thousands of test subjects to get a single human clone. And since a large percentage of these experiments would result in dead mother apes that must be disposed of, you would think such a project would tend to draw attention to itself. Other species would be too genetically different from humans, resulting in certain spontaneous abortion.

Finally, you would need extensive lab work to combine enough DNA and human eggs to result in a single clone. With current fertility treatments where the viability of the DNA is a non-issue, it is common to collect and manipulate several dozen eggs. You would probably need hundreds for a single clone -- more than a single woman could provide even if she wanted to. And your lab facility would have to be quite large to implant these eggs with DNA before they lost their viability for life. I just can't see how you would conceal this large an operation when regulation on both the medical and scientific industries is so tight and public interest in cloning is so high.

I concede it is possible that a single scientist might have cloned between one and five humans in secret. It isn't likely, but it is possible. I certainly don't think there are "unofficial" cloned humans walking around us.

And more important than all of that, the *social consequences* of cloning are unlikely to become an issue until there are at least thousands of clones. A single clone would not have much social impact.

Oh, the EU does a /great/ job! They have defined what a banana is, and what not, what apples and condoms are (and what not); dealers must *pay customs* if they grant ripe bananas (which won't make it to the shop anymore) to hospitals etc -- therefore they are being destroyed right in the harbour.
And when did they start talking about BSE? When did they implement measures?

Please excuse the 1.FCV for posting above. That was me, Bossel, speaking without getting out of the Carnival guise, on behalf of myself.

But the sarcasm stands! The EU have failed in a number of points (just imagine, recommending to not smoke, and at the same time paying Spain $2Billion for more tobacco plants), and BSE is something they failed miserably.

I do not deny the E.U. has its fair share of problems but I still maintain the benefits out way the disadvantages.

Ok, granted. The common currency is a good thing. No mucking about with travellers' checques, and no old/invalid banknotes in the travel box any more.

But one thing that is missing is a control instrument being put opposite to the European Parliament. When the economic borders were torn down, so did the so-called butter-travelling (boarding a ship, travelling outside the 3-mile-zone, buying tax-free stuff, returning home). Ok, why not, although lots of ship owners earned their living from that.
BUT: The members of the highest EC board ("Kommissare") *still have that right* and refuse to give it away, on the grounds that they "don't use it anyway". If so, why bother? And I'm not talking of 100 cigarettes and two bottles of wine. For example, some *thousand* liters of gazoline per year...

'Ok, why not, although lots of ship owners earned their living from that'
The cross channel/border trade is alive and well.

'The members of the highest EC board ("Kommissare") *still have that right* and refuse to give it away, on the grounds that they "don't use it anyway". If so, why bother? And I'm not talking of 100 cigarettes and two bottles of wine. For example, some *thousand* liters of gazoline per year...'
Give me a referance so I check the facts.

My own opinion is there needs to be more democarcy in the E.U.
what do you think of [URL removed by moderator]
You will have to cut & paste the link.

I think I count as pro-Europe, but I must admit to not liking the Commision. I suppose they are supposed to act like a cabinet, but they seem to be obsessed with the strangest things. More power should go to the parliament in my opinion.
As to BSE, while it is being a bit slow, at least Europe is doing something at the hundreds of cases level, rather than Britains hundred of thousands, but there is a certain feeling of smugness involved in watching it.

HappyDude, I was talking about (umm, what is it, the opposite of offshore?) close-to-shore traffic, and there it hit quite a few ship owners. Ok, on the other side the EU were right in stopping this type of round-trip traffic, since the whole business lived on EU subsidies after all.

As to the references you were asking for, I've only found a couple of old references in German, and none with details. Seems as if I was lacking the right vocabulary there.
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This one (from the German Association of Tax-Payers),
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stated that the privileges of the EU commissaires had been *abandoned* (without giving a date for that). If that's true then my ranting is out of date. Anyway, I have contacted Dr. Ingo Friedrich, Member of the European Parliament, for clarification (he put up the question on Nov 1, 1998:
[URL removed by moderator] {in German} )

I do not really have a problem with the commission as such; I have a far bigger problem with the way the Council of Ministers operates.

Testing 1 2 3 testing - anybody out there ?

Yeah, I'm out here. It looks like the Euro issue is going to be fudged by our politicians for the forseeable future, until we get the election over with and then maybe the govt might start talking about it in earnest (at last). Presently the only people making an issue out of it are those directly opposed to it.

I'm basically in favour of the Euro because I think we need to form a powerful trading block to compete with the US and Asian economies. But I think the dominant mood in Britain is overwhelmingly sceptical. The govt seems broadly pro-Europe but would prefer not to discuss the issue at all - sooner or later, though, Blair et al need to learn that they can't be all things to all people all the time, and that to make progress they'll have to risk alienating a large section of the electorate, unless they can start persuading - now.

I don't know, I sort of see Europe as the main issue of the forthcoming UK general election one party against, one party in the middle & one party pro.

'But I think the dominant mood in Britain is overwhelmingly sceptica'
again I'm not so sure - its true of parts of the country but I have to say that a lot of people I talk to her in London are pro, as is UK industry (The CBI is pro euro).

I think if there was a referendum tomorrow the majority of British people would vote against the Euro. The business community is largely converted to the idea, true, but then businessfolk tend to think pragmatically, whereas the average citizen will perhaps be more likely to take sentimental factors (the pound, heritage, blahblah) into account when they make their decision. I think the government still has a long way to go before it convinces the nation as a whole that joining the Euro is a Good Thing.

I also still say that the government is trying to fudge the issue at the moment, and - if spin works its evil way successfully - I think that Europe will be quite marginal in the coming election. In fact, I think the main question to occupy the media in the campaign, will be the likely size of Labour's majority. Hardly thrilling stuff - I think I'll take a couple of months off from reading the papers...