De Lege Delenda - International Legislation on Health-Related Genetics and Biotechnology

Sammanfattning: Law should be the expression of the collective will, and the regulative sphere becomes therefore a highly consensual field supposed to reflect generally agreed norms and values. Although it is generally admitted that genetic and biotechnology developments can contribute to immense benefits within the health-care sector, the exponential globalisation trend and the rapid pace of scientific and technological developments in the field of modern biotechnology makes it however increasingly difficult to substantiate the ideal content of law. The modern life-world is surrounded nowadays by technical imperatives and is confronted by large numbers of reasonable requirements like those arising in the borderland between law and medicine or law and biology. The pace of development and the interplay pattern of unprecedented issues create challenges with which current institutions have considerable difficulties in coping. The dangerous consequence is a growing lack of a general view, the absence of a deeper understanding of the longer-term implications, which is so necessary for the sound development of any kind of balanced and fair global course of action. De Lege Delenda, the fading away of legislation, is meant to draw attention to the difficulties that classical regulation encounters in the face of both the complexity and the pace of recent technological developments, particularly in the field of biotechnology. Between the classical terms De Lege Lata, law as it is given, and De Lege Ferenda, law as it should be, as it should take form in the future, De Lege Delenda points not so much to the absence of efficient law in the field as to the impossibility of regulating these highly innovative fields with the classical tools of traditional law. It indicates a situation in which the regulatory institutions can neither provide a law capable through its implementation of guiding developments nor envisage any potential new way of reaching an ideal solution. The title reflects thus the conclusions drawn from a series of papers constituting this thesis and providing clear indications that legislation has lost much of its previous function and efficacy.