“China Officially Bans CRISPR Babies, Human Clones and Animal-Human Hybrids”, 2021-03-28 (; backlinks; similar):
China’s new Criminal Code, which came into effect four weeks ago on March 1st, has a new section dedicated to ‘illegal medical practices’, which makes it a punishable crime to create gene-edited babies, human clones and animal-human chimeras.
The new section is an amendment to Article 336 of China’s Criminal Law, and officially outlaws “the implantation of genetically-edited or cloned human embryos into human or animal bodies, or the implantation of genetically edited or cloned animal embryos into human bodies”—with penalties ranging from fines to 7 years imprisonment.
…Although Dr He had been sentenced for genetically modifying human embryos, China’s previous criminal code on ‘illegal medical practices’, under which he was sentenced, was extremely vague on the gene-editing of human embryos, and was mostly used to prosecute providers of dangerous medical procedures, and not researchers. The only official Chinese Government legal document that made a stipulation against genetically altering human embryos at the time of Dr He’s sentencing was a scientifically-outdated 2003 guideline by the Chinese Ministry of Health, which mostly addressed ethical issues on human embryonic stem cell research. And thus due to this legal vagueness on human gene-editing, legal experts in China found the court sentencing of Dr He to be very problematic…The new addition to the criminal code is meant to clear up these questions.