Dear Colleagues,

The Turkish Bioethics Association is privileged and honored to host, for the first time in Turkey, the Annual Conference of EACME in Istanbul. The Conference has been organized in collaboration with the Acıbadem University School of Medicine, Medical History and Ethics Department.

The scientific programme covers a wide range of topics related to bioethics from a cross-cultural perspective, including bioethics and humanities, universal values and cultural diversity, European Biomedicine Convention, human rights and bioethics, and health care policy making.

The scope of the Conference has been designed by giving emphasis to the role of bioethics in an interdisciplinary approach with the allied fields by investigating its function in the content of human rights and its implementation in the teaching of medical humanities, in a cross-cultural perspective, keeping in close contact with conflicting issues in bioethics.

The boundaries between bioethics, health law, and human rights are increasingly blurred. These three domains become conceptually and operationally inseparable parts of the same trend towards ensuring respect for the human person in the biomedical field. The major public health issues that we face today can be better addressed if all three disciplines work together. Bioethics can contribute to this interdisciplinarity by accepting its Nuremberg roots and by actively engaging in a health and human rights agenda.

The human rights language is a great advantage to the construction of a universal bioethics. The central concepts that human rights are universal, inalienable, and linked to human dignity have been well articulated, widely endorsed, and publicly embraced. Consequently, harnessing the moral and rhetorical force of human rights language commands international attention to bioethics issues that impact human rights.

The aims of this Conference are to address the interaction between human rights issues and bioethics; to explore common ethical values to facilitate a cross-cultural dialogue and to discuss to what extent human rights can play the role of a lingua franca for international bioethics.

In addition, medical humanities offer a powerful way to convey an understanding the values that shape the physician-patient relationship. Also the European Biomedicine Convention is a very helpful document to explore these values with its special emphasis on human dignity and human rights. Lastly bioethics in conflicting issues in healthcare policy-making, in social justice and inequalities, population policy and gender policies claim to put forth novel and fruitful topics of discussion, all by keynote lectures and presentations.

We would like to extend our special thanks to Dr. Roberto Andorno, member of the Scientific Committee for his intellectual support at every stage of the Conference. We really appreciate efficient support of our colleagues in the EACME Board, Prof. Renzo Pegoraro, Prof. Dr. Chris Gastmans, Dr. Rouven Porz and Ms Angelique Heijnen, the executive secretary, with their helpful suggestions all through the process of preparation. We feel really indebted to the esteemed and eminent bioethicists led by Prof. Dr. Jan Helge Solbakk and Dr. Antony Mark Cutter who have kindly chosen Istanbul as the venue of the Globalising Bioethics Education (GLEUBE) Summer School in order to back the EACME Istanbul Conference on the eve of the meeting. They have made a unique learning opportunity come true with the rich content of the School programme bringing American and European approaches to bioethics into discussion to search the roots of European bioethics methods and approaches in bioethics, human enhancement, converging technologies and public engagement. We express our special thanks to Heather Melanie R. Ames for all the organizational support.

We owe special thanks to the competent key-note speakers, Dr. Deborah Kirklin, Prof. Dr. Guy Widdershoven, Prof. Dr. Elmar Doppelfeldt, Ayşegül Elveriş, L.L.M, Prof. Dr. Richard Ashcroft, Prof. Dr. İbrahim Ö. Kaboğlu, Prof. Dr. Nikola BillerAndorno, Dr. Yvonne Denier who have provided the Conference its distinctive character with their sophisticated lectures to bring about the main themes into discussion. The members of the Scientific Committee who laboriously revised the abstracts deserve special appreciation by contributing to the meeting. We would like to thank the honorary presidents of the Conference, Prof. Dr. Yaman Örs and Prof. Dr. Necmettin Pamir, the Rector, and Prof. Dr. Nurdan Tözün, the Vice-Rector of Acibadem University for their motivating and inspiring confidence in us through the making of this European Conference step by step.

This meeting has been sponsored by public and research funds granted to the projects produced by the Board of the Turkish Bioethics Association. We deeply appreciate Acıbadem University, the Turkish Prime Ministry Public Fund, the Turkish Ministry of Culture for their kind support to the Conference so as to enable the modest Conference budget accomplished. We are indebted to Panaroma Organization Firm care of Mr. Turgay Bektaş and Ms. Tuba Çeliker for their expert support to the Organising Committee; to lʼAjans for the subtle design of the Conferenceʼs visual material, to Verus for the efficient internet page of the Conference, to Mr. Ersin Bektaş, from Çatı Grafik, for the exquisite composition and printing of the Book of Abstracts.

On this occasion, the Turkish Bioethics Association is pleased to publish the Turkish translation of the Guide for Research Ethics Committee Members of the Steering Committee on Bioethics (CDBI) with permission of the Council of Europe to the benefit of the bioethicists and researchers in Turkey.

The main philosophy of the Board of the Turkish Bioethics Association is to function by appreciating individual labour while respecting the collective work as proven by its activities. We aimed to get the bioethicists around the world together in order to create an international academic platform for a multidisciplinary and cross-cultural interaction, and to explore the ways of collaborating and acting together led by the core values of bioethics, dignity, integrity and solidarity in a pluralistic and universalistic approach. This objective can be achieved, by your contributions in full sense; thank you for being with us in our beloved city, Istanbul.