UNITED NATIONS -- The Bush administration on Friday urged quick U.N. action on a global treaty to ban all cloning of human embryos, including for medical research, but diplomats said the measure would go nowhere before the Nov. 2 U.S. elections.
With support for the U.S. stance faltering in the General Assembly's treaty-writing Legal Committee, Washington hopes to avoid an embarrassing loss just days before the election, the diplomats said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Even if they had the votes to win at the United Nations, the emotional issue divides U.S. voters and could harm President Bush's re-election prospects, they said.
A proposal for a U.N. treaty banning human cloning has been bottled up in the United Nations since 2001, with the world body's 191 member nations deeply divided on the issue.
All U.N. members essentially agree on a convention that would ban the cloning of human beings.
But a group of 63 nations, led by the United States and Costa Rica, want an expanded treaty that would ban both the cloning of humans and the cloning of human embryos for stem cell or similar research, known as "therapeutic cloning."
That has put Washington on a collision course with a rival group of countries -- including close allies Britain, Japan, South Korea, India and Turkey -- who are pushing for a treaty banning only the cloning of human beings.
That group would leave it to individual governments to decide whether to allow therapeutic cloning.
The Legal Committee, in a setback for the Bush White House, decided last year by a one-vote margin to delay the writing of any international treaty on cloning, concluding it would be unwise to begin the process when there was no international consensus on its goals.
Since then, several blocs have announced their opposition to a new vote this year, if the committee remains divided.
These include the 60-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference and the 12-country Southern African Development Community.
"We shall not be party to any decision that will have us act hastily without measuring the benefits that medical science can provide to improve the quality of life of our people," Ambassador Alfred Dube of Botswana told the committee, speaking on behalf of the 12-nation southern African bloc.
Advocates of the use of cloned human embryos for research argue the technique holds out the hope of a cure for hundreds of millions of people with such diseases as Alzheimer's, cancer, diabetes and spinal cord damage.
But Washington and others backing a broad U.N. treaty banning all forms of cloning see therapeutic cloning as the taking of human life.
"A ban that differentiates between human reproductive and experimental cloning would essentially authorize the creation of a human embryo for the purpose of destroying it, thus elevating the value of research and experimentation above that of a human life," U.S. special adviser Susan Moore, a Texas lawyer and consultant, told the U.N. panel.
"Future generations need us to act today on our values, principles and convictions," she said.
Moroccan U.N. Ambassador Mohamed Bennouna, the committee chairman, told Reuters he planned to meet informally with the two sides next week in hopes of narrowing their differences.
"We will try to find some common ground," he said.
