One of the most unusual cases has been filed and heard at an appellate court on Wednesday in the state of New York: to extend human rights to a chimpanzee.
The case was filed by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) in defense of a 26-year-old chimpanzee named Tommy, saying that Tommy has been forced to live in a “small, dank, cement cage in a cavernous dark shed,” according to the legal brief text. The group asked that he be given ‘legal personhood,’ and demanded from the court a writ of habeas corpus, which means that the captors must explain to the judge why they have the right to have the person—in this case, a chimpanzee—captive. The group is also demanding that Tommy be moved to a sanctuary in Florida.
“This petition asks this court to issue a writ recognizing that Tommy is not a legal thing to be possessed by respondents, but rather is a cognitively complex, autonomous, legal person with the fundamental legal right not to be imprisoned,” the group said.
NhRP also argues that the state of New York has previously granted legal personhood to other entities than humans, such as corporations and domestic animals that are beneficiaries of trusts, according to the BBC.
“Our goal is, very simply, to breach the legal wall that separates all humans from all nonhuman animals. Once this wall is breached, the first nonhuman animals on earth will gain legal ‘personhood’ and finally get their day in court – a day they so clearly deserve,” NhRP stated in their press release regarding the lawsuit.
However, this lawsuit has received criticism from some legal experts such as Richard Epstein, a professor at New York University Law, and U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Posner, who say that “if animals gain rights once reserved for humans, courts would be inundated with tricky legal questions that could spawn a series of novel and potentially contradictory rulings,” they told Reuters.
Wise argues that he and NhRP does not ask for full human rights to be extended to Tommy and other chimpanzees, but simply that they won’t be held captive out of their will. “After that, … other rights can be negotiated as society considers appropriate,” he told Wired.
The Nonhuman Rights Project further expressed that they plan to file more lawsuits in defense of chimps in Niagara Falls and in Stony Brook University.
The court’s decision on this case is expected to be released in four to six weeks.
