Abstract
The Article 19 of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights calls for the establishment of ethics committees at various levels. There are different types of ethics committees and it is important to distinguish their missions as well as their compositions and operations: National Bioethics Committees, Clinical Ethics Committees, Research Ethics Committees, and Ethics Committees of professional healthcare associations.
This chapter deals with National Bioethics Committees (NBCs). After recalling their emergence over the last decades and the reasons for that movement encouraged today worldwide by the UNESCO Ethics Program – it presents the ways in which they promote the UDBHR and its principles, and try to implement it in practice. Based on the experience of such committees (in Switzerland in particular), the chapter elaborates on the conditions and rules necessary for NBCs to comply with the requirements of independence, multidisciplinarity and pluralism posed by Article 19 of the Declaration.
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Martin, J.F. (2016). The National Bioethics Committees and the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights: Their Potential and Optimal Functioning. In: Bagheri, A., Moreno, J., Semplici, S. (eds) Global Bioethics: The Impact of the UNESCO International Bioethics Committee. Advancing Global Bioethics, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22650-7_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22650-7_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-22649-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-22650-7
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