US courts asked to recognise chimps as people
7 Dec The News
Walking, talking chimpanzees may be TV comedy gold but now three
courts in New York are being asked to recognise four chimps as "legal
persons" with fundamental rights.
The move would allow the animals to be released into sanctuaries
where they could live out the reminder of their days in freedom, says
the Nonhuman Rights Project behind the initiative.
On Monday it petitioned a court in Fulton County Court, New York
State, in the name of Tommy, a chimpanzee held captive in a cage at a
used trailer lot in nearby Gloversville.
On Tuesday it did the same for Kiko, a 26-year-old chimpanzee who is
deaf and living in a private home in Niagara Falls.
The group will Thursday lodge a similar petition on behalf of
Hercules and Leo, who are owned by a research center and used in
locomotion experiments on Long Island. "The lawsuits ask the judge to
grant the chimpanzees the right to bodily liberty and to order that they
be moved to a sanctuary," the organisation said in a statement.
There the animals can live out their days in an environment as close
to the wild as is possible in North America, it added.The challenge is
based on the principle of habeas corpus, which the petitioners said was
used in New York and allowed slaves to challenge their status and
establish their right to freedom.
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