PRESS CONFERENCE BY COSTA RICA’S PRESIDENT

PRESS CONFERENCE BY COSTA RICA’S PRESIDENT

Abel Pacheco, President of Costa Rica, told correspondents at a Headquarters press conference today that his Government was opposed to human cloning on moral grounds and he hoped that the United Nations would reach a decision before the end of the year on a convention against human cloning.

Mr. Pacheco spoke to journalists after meeting with Secretary-General Kofi Annan, during which the two discussed the situation in Haiti and Costa Rica’s position on human cloning.  He denied charges that his country’s stance had effectively blocked movement on the issue of cloning and, in doing so, had prolonged suffering, or perhaps even caused more difficulties in the lives of people who were waiting for the therapeutic benefits that could come from cloning.

On Haiti and its needs, Mr. Pacheco urged Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to consider stepping down in the interest of avoiding a blood bath in Haiti.  “If I had been Aristide”, “he said, “I would have left, but that is just my own perspective.”  He described as “desperate and sad” the situation in Haiti, a situation he said affected everyone in the Caribbean.  Nations in the region owed Haiti a debt of gratitude, as the oldest independent country in the Latin American area.  Costa Rica was willing to send its army, which was made up of doctors, agricultural extension workers and other types of specialists, to help Haiti recover its devastated environment.  He further hoped that a multinational intervention force under the United Nations would be in place soon.

Flanked by Costa Rican Foreign Minister Roberto Tovar, he said, as a doctor, he was extremely preoccupied and concerned by the health situation in Haiti, especially by the scourge of AIDS, tuberculosis, dengue and such diseases, which, to a large extent, were controllable.  As a President, he was similarly concerned about the level of violence now prevailing in the country.

Reaffirming Costa Rica’s stance on human cloning, Foreign Minister Tovar said fate had made Costa Rica the leader on the issue in the United Nations.  But now there were almost 70 co-sponsors and many more were prepared to fight for a convention against human cloning.

The President said, if what people were looking for were “spare parts” for people who were ill, those could be obtained from stem cells originating in a living person and there was, therefore, no need to create a human being to then just “tear out” the sought organs and doom the new being to death.  That was unnecessary and cruel, he explained.  He added that it was not moral or acceptable to prolong the life of one person by killing another person.

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