On 7 December 2018, the HELP course on Key Human Rights Principles in Biomedicine was presented and launched in Minsk at an international conference organised in the framework of the Action Plan of the Council of Europe for Belarus. The conference was jointly organised by the Bioethics Unit of the Council of Europe and the Ministry of health of the Republic of Belarus together with the Belarusian Medical Academy of Postgraduate Education and the Institute for retraining and qualification upgrading of judges, prosecutors and legal professionals at the Belarusian state university, with the support of the Information Point of the Council of Europe in Minsk.
The conference was opened by Elena Bohdan, Head of the Department of Medical Services, Ministry of health of Belarus, and Head of the National Bioethics Committee, and by Laurence Lwoff, Head of the Bioethics Unit of the Council of Europe. They stressed the good cooperation in place between the Council of Europe and the relevant authorities of Belarus in the area of bioethics.
The conference participants could benefit from presentations delivered by a series of national and international experts in the area, including Ritva Halila, Senior medical officer, Ministry of Social Affairs and Health of Finland, Dmitry Vasilevich, Office of the Prosecutor general of the Republic of Belarus, Aleksei Glinnik, Minsk Scientific-Practical Centre of Surgery, Transplantology and Haematology and professor of the Belarusian Medical Academy of Post-graduate Education, and Mikayel Khachatryan, Head of International Cooperation Department of the Human Rights Defender's Office of Armenia and Director of Health Law Master Program at the Russian-Armenian University.
The HELP course on Key Human Rights Principles in Biomedicine was also presented to the participants of the conference. Following this event, it will be implemented as a tutored course for a mixed group of medical and legal professionals. It will be tutored and moderated by Vladimir Moroz, Deputy Director of the Institute for retraining and qualification upgrading of judges, prosecutors and legal professionals at the Belarusian state university, and Mikalai Halabarodzka, professor of the Belarusian Medical Academy of Post-graduate Education. The successful participants will be jointly certified by the Council of Europe and the partner institutions.
The course consists of eight modules:
- Introduction
- Free and Informed Consent
- Medical Confidentiality and Protection of Health Related Data
- Protection of the Embryo and Procreation
- End of Life
- Genetic Testing
- Biomedical Research
- Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues
In the first half of 2019 it will be available on the HELP online platform in Russian, Italian, Armenian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Spanish, French and German.
HELP course brief on Key Human Rights Principles in Biomedicine
Launch of the HELP course on Bioethics in Belarus. © Council of Europe
