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Today many an application of the formidable scientific progress has significant implications for humanity. They are nonetheless fraught with fundamental ethical interrogations. Indeed, whilst each and every member of society, and particularly the most vulnerable, children, should benefit from this progress, they may also be exposed to its potential dangers.
Children are vulnerable, fragile beings, as their physical and mental welfare and the full development of their personalities depend to a large extent on their parents, on the adults in their immediate environment and on society as a whole. Children's rights - indeed as the rights of every person - are enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (10 December 1948) and in the two International Covenants on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and on Civil and Political Rights (16 December 1966). In particular, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (20 November 1989) provides for special protection. The ethical aspects of scientific progress are highlighted in two recent texts: the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights (adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO on 11 November 1997), and, at the regional level, the European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (signed on 4 April 1997).
Technologies developed to treat infertility, such as medical assistance to human reproduction, and genetics applications designed to prevent certain genetic conditions are at a risk of being diverted from their aims, in order to serve quite different purposes such as eugenic selection. Certain prenatal tests, which are meant to detect genetic mutations, can be applied, for instance, to select foetuses based on gender selection. Pre-implantation diagnoses could lend themselves to further drifts. The same could be said for techniques that have not yet been mastered, such as the cloning of embryos or, in a more distant future, the cloning of adult somatic cells.
The difficulties that these issues present to ethical reflection must not be denied. They directly entail religious or spiritual convictions and are often at the core of diverse cultural traditions. From one country to another, from one community to another, the answers to these questions come laden with subtle nuances as well as significant contrasts.
In addition, tensions may exist between two sets of rights, such as the rights of adults, who are parents, and those of their children, jeopardizing the effective exercise of various civil rights. By virtue of Article 23 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights adults can invoke the right to found a family and demand access to new reproductive technologies. Similarly, the separation of a couple who has resorted to in vitro fertilisation to have a child and later (when admissible by law) files in a suit of denying parenthood to that child, puts at stake the right of every child to have a name or a nationality, as per Article 24 of the same Covenant. Courts have to deal with dramatic cases of surrogate motherhood, whereby children seek to identify their biological mother, or in cases of parents who request parental identification procedures, notably after a recourse to in vitro fertilization with sperm and/or egg donor.
Shouldn't the rights of the child prevail over those of adults? Shouldn't the interest of the child take precedence over the will or interests of the family? Does the desire to have a child legitimize all practices? Must biological parenthood be preferred at all cost to sociological parenthood (for instance, through adoption)? In short, how best can the rights of the child, the rights of the family and the freedom of women be balanced, whilst preventing the desire to have a child from reducing the child to an object?
On another hand, medical research is bound to devise experimentation on children who suffer from specific diseases in order to develop treatments targeting diseases that specifically affect children. Perhaps this, more than any other, is a question that warrants rigorous study. Such is the need to pay close attention to biomedical research - an indispensable condition of progress - if the rights of the child are to be protected.
It should be added that many children in the world are waiting for organ transplants and, for reasons of biological compatibility, the organs they need must be taken from children. Are the questions surrounding the removal of organs from children straightforward? Do all such cases meet the conditions set forth to ensure that the rights of the child are protected?
Far from exhaustive, these various interrogations provided the framework of the International Symposium on Bioethics and the Rights of the Child. The symposium further underscored such issues as anonymity, and the consent that is given by the child, or in his or her name.
A Statement was adopted at the closing of the Symposium. It stressed the prevalence of the rights of the child over those of adults, underscored the unshakeable singularity of each child, and contributed to paving the way to renewed thinking on all these issues. In so doing, this Statement was timely.
 The papers presented at the Symposium were published by UNESCO
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