The United Nations (UN) has denounced human cloning saying that the universal declaration on human genome and human rights bans the practice as an offence against humanity. The declaration against cloning was adopted recently by 186 member states of the UN Educational, Scientific and Culural Organisation (UNESCO). UNESCO director-general Federico Mayor strongly opposed the human cloning while commenting on a statement by American researcher Richard Seed who anounced that he plans to clone humans soon. Article 11 of the declaration says that practices which are contrary to human dignity, such as cloning of human beings, shall not be permitted.
A ceremony was held at UN Environment Programme (UNEP) headquarters recently to publicly recognise the decision of several US federal agencies to increase their support to the North American node of the Global Resource Information Database (GRID) of the UNEP for the next five years: 1998-2002. UNEP is a decentralised network of centres focusing on, and able to provide and analyse, geographic data-sets concentrating on environmental issues of international significance. GRID centres typically have the ability, expertise, technology and mandate to prepare, analyse and present information about Earth resources, the basis of reliable environmental assessments.
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