Biomedicine and EU Law: Unlikely Encounters?

This paper looks at European Union (EU) biomedical law and seeks to understand how the regulation of biomedicine ever reached the EU’s agenda. The odds were low, for not only does the EU not have any straightforward competence in the field, it is also one of extreme axiological sensitivity that in all likelihood could have favoured the containment of the issues within national borders. To be sure, internal market legislation is not alien to non-market values; conversely, biomedical issues themselves are undergoing radical evolutions as body parts tend to increasingly circulate in what now appears to be ‘tissue economies’. Although these factors alone do not suffice to explain the existence and development of an important body of biomedical law at the EU level, the paper’s claim is that ‘ethics’ has proven to be an instrumental device for bridging biomedical law and EU law. It then analyses the several manners in which ‘ethics’ has played a crucial part in EU biomedical law and pushes the reflection to suggesting that the regulation of biomedicine actually constitutes a polity-affirming process for the EU.