Cloning bills outdated says PM

Human cloning bans being considered by Parliament would be updated to catch up with the latest technology, Prime Minister Helen Clark says.

Plans to clone humans, unveiled in Rome on Friday, have caused widespread debate, particularly in religious and scientific circles.

Parliament has two pieces of legislation addressing such work. Both have been on the books for years.

Today Miss Clark said neither law had kept up with technology.

In 1996 Labour MP Dianne Yates introduced her Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill, which would ban cloning human embryos.

The Assisted Human Reproduction Bill, introduced by the National Government in 1998, also called for a ban on cloning.

Miss Clark said the bills would need to be updated if they were to cover such technology: "I certainly feel there is a gap in the law which shouldn't remain."

Both bills are meant to be reported back to Parliament at the end of June.

The issue of cloning was highlighted when Panayiotis Zavos, an American working with Italian Severino Antinori and Israeli Ali Ben Abraham, said between 600 and 700 couples had registered to take part in a cloning experiment and that numbers were rising rapidly.

Technically, cloning is not illegal in this country but would require permission from the Government's ethics watchdog, the national ethics committee on human assisted reproduction. Doctors involved in fertility clinics here have ruled out attempting the same experiment.

Green MP Sue Kedgley said New Zealand urgently needed rules on human cloning.

"I am concerned that some fertility specialists and researchers seem not to want legislation, preferring to continue to work in an essentially unregulated environment in which the community has very little, if any, say over issues that have profound ethical issues for society," she said in a statement.