Human cloning is a highly sensitive issue and, as Minister of State, I share the Senator's concern about the absence of statutory controls in this area. In so far as the Council of Europe Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine is concerned, the position is that a protocol to the convention prohibits any intervention seeking to create a human being genetically identical to another human being, whether living or dead. This protocol is only open for signature to those states that have signed the convention. Ireland is not a signatory to the convention because there are difficulties with a number of articles that have implications for the destruction of human embryos.