The paper addresses debates on the way international institutions are taken out of the sphere of technocratic and executive politics. Looking at the case of the EU, it appears indeed that international policy-making is becoming increasingly concerned with value-based policies, which have been at the core of the politicisation of EU policy-making. Over the last 15 years, the EU has indeed come to intervene in new policy fields which have a strong ethical component. The regulation of data protection, controversies on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and contested areas of research, such as human embryonic stem cell science and research on primates, have indeed been at the core of the ‘ethicisation’ of EU politics. Moreover, debates on these questions, formerly presented in highly technical terms, have also been reframed as controversies over fundamental values. Thus, a new type of policy conflict has emerged, characterized by debate over first principles, such as the status of human dignity, the definition of human life, respect for privacy and freedom of information. By focusing on the case of medical biotechnologies, the paper seeks to examine whether the involvement of the EU with ethical questions has led to a change of governance mode in these sectors and to new forms of legitimation of public decisions. It argues that rather than a politicisation of EU policy-making and a democratisation of legitimating mechanisms, what we observe is in fact a re-technocratisation and a juridification process of EU governance. Re-technocratisation has taken place via the creation of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (the ‘EGE’) in 1991, which is composed of scientists, lawyers but also theologists. The EGE members are now the new ‘regulatory experts’ giving advice on the ethical implications of a number of EU decisions. Thus, scientific expertise is still the main source of legitimacy of public decisions, but the nature of scientific expertise has changed. Second, whereas controversies over ethical issues were too patent to be solved trough legislative compromises, the locus of policy-making has shifted towards the judiciary arena. In October 2011, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) issued a ruling deciding on a European definition of the embryo, an issue that had been the object of fierce debate during legislative debates on biotechnology patenting and advanced therapies . Thus, although the EU has come to intervene and make decisions on ethical matters in ways unprecedented, this has not led to a fundamental change of governance mode and legitimation mechanisms away from traditional technocratic routes.
