Appendix 1. International organization established
to solve the problems of global survival and human health
maintenance
UNESCO includes two committees in bioethics - an international one and an intergovernmental one. At the Council of Europe, bioethics is dealt with by the Bioethics Guiding Committee. A bioethics working group also exists within the World Health Organization. Ethical and legal regulation in the field of bioethics is carried out on the basis of international normative documents. The most important of them are: Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights (UNESCO, 1997); Universal Declaration on the Bioethics and Human Rights (UNESCO, 2005); Declaration on Human cloning (UN, 2005); Legally binding Convention on the Protection of Human Rights in relation to the Application of Advances in Biology and Medicine: Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (Council of Europe, 1997) and its additional protocols concerning the prohibition of human cloning, transplantology, and biomedical researches. International authority is enjoyed by such a document as the Declaration of Helsinki of the World Medical Organization (1964, last edition - 2000) "Ethical principles of scientific medical research with human participation". Its main statements are embodied in the national legislation of a number of countries including the CIS and, of course, in modern Russia.
Today, in many countries of the world, there exist influential national ethics committees or commissions attached to the legislative or executive authorities. They make decisions on the most pressing issues of bioethics. The Russian National Committee on Bioethics of the Russian Academy of Sciences was established in 1992. In the same year, the International Association of Bioethics was organized, which holds World Congresses every two years. The sector has many periodicals, the most authoritative of which are: "Bioethics" (organ of the International Association of Bioethics, since 1987); "The Hastings Center Report" (since 1970); "Journal of Medical Ethics" (since 1975). However, in general, bioethics exists as an ever-expanding and increasingly complex field of moral and legal problems, which usually do not have simple and unambiguous solutions.