This paper is focused on the analysis of two documents (the Council of Europe's Bioethics Convention and the Additional Cloning Protocol) inasmuch as they refer to the relationship between human dignity and human genetic engineering. After presenting the stipulations of the abovementioned documents, I will review various proposed meanings of human dignity and will try to identify which of these seem to be at the core of their underlying assumptions. Is the concept of dignity proposed in the two documents coherent? Is it morally legitimate? Is it, as some might assume, of Kantian origin? Does it have any philosophical roots?

The debate related to the reproductive technologies remains important due to the unsolved controversies already present since the previous discussions related to the matter of abortion, and while its arguments are in many ways common to those now invoked in the matter of human genetic engineering. As we shall see, many of the issues at stake are merely a reiteration of the arguments raised within the abortion debate, and often they become circular when it comes to the status of the embryo. Does the embryo have rights of any sort? Is it moral to destroy it? We will see which the major lines of argumentation are, in the light of the so often used terminology of human rights. Far from being exhaustive, the article is meant to briefly present the arguments, while trying to discuss some of their implications. Thus, the article goes on to tackle issues like embryo selection and discrimination as long as connected to our subject. These are at the borderline between the reproductive technologies debate and that of human genetic engineering, which involves more than selection or destruction of embryos.