Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the granting of a patent on genetically modified human embryos and on a technique which might possibly lead to the cloning of human beings is a huge scandal. This is a flagrant violation of human dignity. The event shows how important it was for the European Parliament, in debating the directive on the patenting of biotechnological inventions, to have made it a cornerstone of the directive that there can be no question of patenting techniques for cloning human beings and for manipulating human genetic material, still less of patenting the human being in all phases of his development. Many people said at the time that these clarifications were quite unnecessary and that a patent of this kind would never be granted anyway. We now see how important these clarifications were. The European Patent Office has incorporated the European Union’s directive into its own directives. It is not, in fact, bound directly by the Council’s and Parliament’s directive but has incorporated word for word what we decided upon at the time into its implementing rules. What has happened in this connection is therefore a flagrant breach of the European Patent Office’s own rules. Nor can I feel any sympathy or understanding for those who say that, oh, there was nothing very untoward about the granting of this patent, that we should not be getting so worked up about it and that, what is more, the technique in question may potentially have a lot to offer. Then, there was a press statement from Europabio, which was not very helpful in this regard and, following which, I wrote a letter to the chairman of Europabio pointing out that such an ambivalent position on the patent involved was not at all helpful in furthering people’s understanding of biotechnology. It must also meet with vigorous protest in the European Parliament. It is not, however, a question of the directive we adopted in 1998 being a bad one. It is a question of its needing to be applied better. There has been a breach of this directive, and we ought not, therefore, to bring the directive into question but instead to make sure that the directive is applied both in the European Patent Office and also through being transposed into national law. We stated clearly at the time that we are in favour of biotechnology and approve of the opportunities it presents, but we want to see clear, ethically based limits. There is also something else which requires clarification. The European Parliament has always taken a clear stand, not only against the patenting of techniques which violate human dignity, but also against such techniques themselves. Parliament has always repudiated the cloning of human beings, the manipulation of human genetic material and the use of embryos in research. Take, for example, Mr Tannert’s report on the relevant research programme in these areas. The Group of the European People’s Party has therefore tabled Amendment No 4 in order once again to make it clear that we are not going back on this. We shall, in any case, vote in favour of this resolution because the European Parliament must send out a clear signal in this regard.

Political group: PPE-DE