'Close cloning loophole'

Emergency legislation is needed to close a loophole in the existing law which could allow scientists to carry out human cloning, it was claimed today.

The call for a change in the law came from the pressure group Pro-Life Alliance which is campaigning against human cloning.

It followed a High Court ruling today that human cloning was not covered by the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority Act.

Health Secretary Alan Milburn is to carry out an urgent review of the 1990 Act after Mr Justice Crane today ruled it did not cover the technique used for cloning known as cell nuclear replacement.

The judge ruled that an organism created by the technique - similar to the one used to create Dolly the sheep - is not an embryo and therefore not covered by the act.

The Human Fertility and Embryology Authority licenses all fertility clinics in the UK on specific terms about what treatments and techniques can be carried out.

The director of the ProLife Alliance, which took the case to the High Court, today warned that there were no legal safeguards to prevent human cloning in the UK. Bruno Quintavalle said: "The upshot of the judgment is that there are no safeguards to stop any form of cloning in this country. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has no power to stop it, it isn't a criminal offence and there is nothing that any public authority can do.

"The law as it stands is hopeless and we are glad we have shown up the Government lie that human cloning is prohibited."

He called on the Government to introduce emergency legislation immediately and said a House of Lords select committee which had been investigating the subject for a year had been working on a totally false premise. It should be disbanded and replaced with a new committee, he said.

The Government gave a commitment in August to bring in specific legislation to make human reproductive cloning illegal, but no such law has yet been introduced.

A Department of Health spokesman said today: "It is not covered in the 1990 HFEA act because the technology did not exist at that time. It was an act to set up a regulatory authority."

However, before today's ruling, the Government and HFEA interpretation-of the act was that it did ban reproductive cloning. Mr Milburn will now decide "as a matter of urgency" the best way of overturning today's ruling.

Two possible options include appealing to overturn the ruling or introducing new legislation.

A Department of Health spokesman added that in theory the law did not cover human cloning, but in practice it was unlikely that any doctor would go ahead with it.

A spokesman for the HFEA said: "We will be talking to the Department of Health about this ruling."

The ProLife Alliance had gone to the High Court in a bid to halt all kinds of human cloning experiments and to force the Government to tighten up the legal framework.

Gerald Barling, QC, for ProLife, told Mr Justice Crane that it was particularly important to clarify the law because the technology for cloning humans was now said to be available, or at least being pursued. He argued, successfully, that embryos created by cell nuclear replacement did not involve fertilisation. This meant, he said, that their development was not covered legally because they fell outside the definition of an embryo under the existing act.