UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 18 -- A deeply divided General Assembly committee voted Friday to approve a declaration calling on governments to prohibit all forms of human cloning, including techniques used in research on human stem cells.
The assembly's legal committee voted 71 to 35 with 43 abstentions to adopt the proposal, which was put forward by Honduras and backed by the United States but opposed by advocates of stem cell studies.
The nonbinding measure now goes to the full 191-nation assembly.
Before adopting the text, the assembly's legal committee rejected a series of amendments by Belgium that would have softened the declaration to make it more acceptable to supporters of stem cell research.
