EUROBIOLAW · Towards a European model of biomedical law?

The EUROBIOLAW hypothesizes that the ill-known but developing body of EC law in the field of biomedical issues is of crucial importance, because it involves crucial legal and theoretical stakes that are worth studying. First, it serves as an emblem for the ongoing tension within the field of biomedical law in general between the “fundamental rights” approach and a wider approach that notably takes into account the ever-increasing economic and financial dimension of biotechnologies. In this respect, it seems both very interesting to study the way they are regulated at the level of the EU, for this tension between rights and regulation is constitutive to that specific legal order –with a primarily economic identity, from which an unquestionable interest in fundamental rights has grown out. Secondly, the fact that biomedical issues do not correspond to any straightforward competence within the EU and that additionally, they have strong axiological dimensions that would a priori plea for their being regulated at the national level, make it particularly interesting to observe a body of EC law emerging on those matters. Therefore, EC biomedical law is a good observation point for understanding EC law elaboration processes in general, and the specific challenges it faces in such new domains: tension between the goal of harmonization and the respect for national diversity, tension between fundamental rights and economic freedoms... Concretely, the EUROBIOLAW project aims at providing with a genealogical approach of this emerging body of EC law, by not only taking a census of legal norms in the field, but also identifying the actors of their elaboration process as well as their argumentative lines. The goal is thus to enrich the sole knowledge of the existing body of EC law related to biomedical issues by the cognizance of its genealogy, both socio-institutional (who intervened in its elaboration) and argumentative (on what rhetorical grounds).