The language of ethics has become a conspicuous feature of the politics of biomedical research and practice. The last two decades have seen the creation of governmental ethical advisory commissions, administrative bodies charged with ethical decision-making, and public funding for studying the ethical implications of new technologies. This paper analyses the  role of national ethical counsils as advisory bodies in national ethopolitical regimes. This paper addresses the question  wether the instituitonalsization of ethical expertise in  ethics councils as advisory bodies contributes to a limitation of political conflict concerning the biomedical issues. The paper compares two national cases, namely Germany’s National Ethics Council with the Swedish National Council on Medical Ethics. Both countries represent contrasting cases of dominant ethical traditions and with regard to the time of emergence of such bodies. The Swedish council was a pioneer institution inaugurated in 1985, whereas Germany´s council  was a latecomer, established in 2001. This paper explores how such advisory institutions actually work from a double perspective. On the one hand, the paper examines the emergence and role of such bodies in political processes and thus how they have come to be understood as “political expertise”; on the other hand, the paper investigates the concrete working procedures of these councils and thus their modes of producing “ethical expertise”. Despite the differences the results of the study indicate similarities in the modes of producing “ethical expertise” and gives indicators, that such national ethics councils infact contributes to a depoliticization of biomedical issues.