ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the question of whether the rights contained in the Council of Europe of a Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine reflect universal ethical principles against which to judge domestic legal regimes on medical research with neonates in Europe. It outlines and critically evaluates the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) ethical framework. The chapter argues that consent is central to the moral and political legitimacy of medical research and discusses the circumstances in which the proposed weakening of consent requirements in emergency trials is morally permissible. ACHRE investigates allegations of unethical experiments conducted on human subjects by American researchers between the end of Second World War and the early 1970s. In one of the most fascinating academic polemics to date Robert Baker, a philosopher and historian of medicine, has argued that the search for universal moral principles is fundamentally misguided and charged the findings of the ACHRE report with moral bankruptcy.
