Chimpanzees to get human rights!

A US court is set to decide if a chimpanzee is entitled to the same rights as humans this week.

In what experts say is the first case of its kind, lawyers will argue that a chimpanzee called Tommy is being “unlawfully imprisoned” in a shed in upstate New York, and he is entitled to “legal personhood,” meaning the animal would be capable of having legal rights.

Tommy is a 26-year-old chimpanzee living in what Steven Wise, the lawyer behind the case, has described as a “dark, dank shed,” and should be transferred to a chimp sanctuary in Florida.

The legal mechanism Wise is using in Tommy's case is usually filed on behalf of people such as prison inmates, who claim they have been unlawfully imprisoned.

Wise is part of The Nonhuman Rights Project, which claims it is the only organisation working toward “actual legal rights for members of species other than our own”.

He has said that “as a matter of both liberty and equality, Tommy should be seen as a person”.

Previous lawsuits involving Tommy's legal rights have not ruled in the chimpanzee's favour, but Mr Wise is appealing this decision, and said that if the New York State appeals court rules in the animal's favour it could lead to further cases asking for rights of intelligent animals such as elephants, dolphins, orcas, and other non-human primates.

Wise, who is based in Boston, added: “The next argument could be that Tommy also has the right to bodily integrity, so he couldn't be used in biomedical research.”

Legal experts including the US Circuit Judge Richard Posner have criticized the quest for legal rights for animals however.

Tommy's owner, Patrick Lavery, has waived his right to make an argument before the New York state appeals court, and has not recently commented on the case.

When the lawsuit was filed last year Lavery claimed that Tommy's “shed” is a state of the art, $150,000 (£93,400) facility.

Lavery also claimed at the time that Tommy had been on a waiting list for a primate sanctuary for three years.

Later this year an appeals court in Rochester in the US will hear another case from Wise concerning a chimpanzee called Kiko.