10/08/2001 (Agence Europe) - Germany and France have officially handed UN Secretary General Kofi Annan at joint text calling for the drawing up of a "universal UN Convention prohibiting human cloning for reproductive purposes". It was in June that the foreign ministers of the two countries, Hubert Vedrine and Joschka Fischer, agreed on an initiative aimed at setting in place an world legal instrument stipulating the "unacceptable nature, contrary to the principle of human dignity" that is the cloning of human beings. France considers that this Convention must be modelled on the "universal declaration on the human genome and human rights", adopted by Unesco in 1997. According to Vedrine, this text would be the best reference framework, given the current debates on bio-ethics. The representatives of Paris and Berlin called for their project to be included on the agenda of the forthcoming UN General Assembly, next month. (For the Commission's stance on this subject, see EUROPE of 9 August, p.1).