Triumph in New York; The United Nations Condemns Human Cloning.

March 8, 2005, will go down in history. It is the date on which the plenary session of the United Nations General Assembly ratified solemnly the anti-cloning declaration recommended by its legal committee. By an even larger margin of nearly 3-1, the General Assembly called on member states to ban all human cloning.

The vote was 84-34, though six further nations asked to be added to the yes vote, taking it to 90. Despite the fact that the American press has largely ignored the news (it got only a fleeting one-paragraph reference in the New York Times, for example), and the attempts of well-placed pro-cloning commentators to dismiss its significance, it may prove to be one of the most important events of our lifetime.

Eight years after the cloning of Dolly the sheep, and just weeks after the British government, the only major pro-cloning nation in the West, granted Dolly's cloner Ian Wilmut a license to clone human embryos for research, the nations of the globe have solemnly spoken against the "Brave New World." Heeding President Bush's direct appeal in his recent speech to the General Assembly, and ignoring the biotech industry's hype, they have taken a historic step for sanity and the human future.

What does this mean? Critics of the declaration were quick to argue that it was merely a declaration, and not a convention. A convention is a treaty, binding those parties who sign it to introduce laws to implement what it says. But in the UN system not everyone is obliged to sign. Had the Cloning Declaration been a convention, the People's Republic of China and the United Kingdom would have refused to sign anyway.

As it happens, you could argue that a declaration has greater moral force, since nations do not need to sign onto it. It stands as a statement of the UN's view of things and speaks for the international community. Perhaps the most important single document of the 20th century was the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights.