Abstrakt

HUMAN DIGNITY IN THE JUDGMENT IN CASE C-34/10 OLIVER BRÜSTLE V GREENPEACE EV
Summary
The judgment in Case C-34/10 Oliver Brüstle v Greenpeace eV. has not defined limits to the development of biomedicine, nor has it demarcated a boundary to science’s admissible intervention in a human life. However, a few of its consequences, not only the legal ones, call for special emphasis. First of all, it was the first time that the question of boundaries to progress in biomedicine was put to European public opinion. Embryonic stem cells were recognised as having the potential to develop into a human being, which gives sufficient grounds for a prohibition on their commercial destruction; thereby an effective barrier was laid down to further development in the commercial application of embryonic stem cell research, on the grounds not only of secondary law (directives), but also of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The C-34/10 judgment has thus ruled out all concepts of dignity which adopt an instrumental approach to the integrality (inviolability) of the human person. However, the task of making ethical and valueoriented distinctions is still a problem facing judges and legislators in their everyday legal practice, since they now have to abide not only by the provisions of their respective national constitutions, but also by the supranational EU law. The dilemma which has emerged in connection with progress in contemporary science has put the European Union in a situation where it has to make a choice between the integral concept of human life covering all the stages of human development, and the notion of the human individual as the outcome of technological potential.