A new report comparing biosecurity laws is now available on the Law Library of Congress website. The report examines how Group of Twenty (G20) nations define “biosafety,” “biosecurity,” and related terms in legislation, codes, regulations, and guidelines.
According to the report’s comparative summary, G20 nations have multiple approaches for defining biosecurity-related legal terms.
Among the G20 nations’ laws discussed in this report, the methods for defining the terms “biosafety” and “biosecurity” generally fall into one of four categories. In the first category, “biosafety” and “biosecurity” are clearly defined in legislation or regulations, with specific distinctions. In the second set of jurisdictions, the term “biosecurity” is applied generally to topics such as laboratory safety, protecting the environment, and guarding against criminal activity involving biological agents that may harm people, plants, animals, and the environment. In other nations, laws may include one identified term, but government strategy statements or publications by government-related scientific organizations supplement the available legal definitions with more detailed descriptions of “biosafety” and “biosecurity.” The remaining nations addressed in this report have enacted laws addressing biosecurity matters, but these laws contain no legal definitions for “biosafety,” “biosecurity,” or similar terminology.
The report lists key multilateral treaties involving biosafety and biosecurity and identifies which G20 nations are signatories to specific treaties. Those treaties include the Biological Weapons Convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Cartegena Protocol, and the Nagoya Protocol.
We invite you to review our report here to find out more.
The report is an addition to the Law Library’s Legal Reports (Publications of the Law Library of Congress) collection, which includes over 4,000 historical and contemporary legal reports covering a variety of jurisdictions, researched and written by foreign law specialists with expertise in each area. To receive alerts when new reports are published, you can subscribe to email updates and the RSS feed for Law Library Reports (click the “subscribe” button on the Law Library’s website). The Law Library also regularly publishes articles related to biosecurity in the Global Legal Monitor.
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