Great ape personhood

Bonobos, members of the great ape family

Great ape personhood is a movement to extend personhood and some legal protections to the four non-human members of the Hominidae or great ape family: bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans.

Advocates include primatologists Jane Goodall and Dawn Prince-Hughes, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher Peter Singer, and legal scholar Steven Wise.

Early legislation

On February 28, 2007 the parliament of the Balearic Islands, an autonomous community of Spain, passed the world's first legislation that would effectively grant legal personhood rights to all great apes. The act sent ripples out of the region and across Spain, producing public support for the rights of great apes. On June 25, 2008 a parliamentary committee set forth resolutions urging Spain to grant the primates the rights to life and liberty. If approved "it will ban harmful experiments on apes and make keeping them for circuses, television commercials, or filming illegal under Spain's penal code."

These precedents followed years of European legal efforts. In 1992, Switzerland amended its constitution to recognize animals as beings and not things. However, in 1999 the Swiss constitution was completely rewritten. A decade later, Germany guaranteed rights to animals in a 2002 amendment to its constitution, becoming the first European Union member to do so.

New Zealand granted strong protections to five great ape species in 1999. Their use is now forbidden in research, testing, or teaching. Some argue that New Zealand's protections amount to a form of weak legal rights.

Several European countries (including Austria, the Netherlands and Sweden) completely banned the use of great apes in animal testings.

Stances

Advocacy

Well-known advocates are primatologist Jane Goodall, appointed a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations to fight the bushmeat trade and end ape extinction; Richard Dawkins, former Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University; Peter Singer, professor of philosophy at Princeton University; and attorney and former Harvard professor Steven Wise.

Goodall's longitudinal studies revealed the social and family life of chimps to be very similar to that of human beings in some respects. She herself calls them individuals, and says they relate to her as an individual member of the clan. Laboratory studies of ape language ability began to reveal other human traits, as did genetics, and eventually three of the great apes were reclassified as hominids.

This, plus rising ape extinction and the animal rights movement has put pressure on nations to recognize apes as having limited rights and being legal "persons." In response, the United Kingdom introduced a ban on research using great apes, although testing on other primates has not been limited.

Writer and lecturer, Thomas Rose, makes the argument that granting legal rights afforded to humans to non-humans is nothing new. He points out that in the majority of the world, "corporations are recognized as legal persons and are granted many of the same rights humans enjoy, the right to sue, to vote and to freedom of speech." Dawn Prince-Hughes has written that great apes meet all the standards set out for personhood: "self-awareness; comprehension of past, present, and future; the ability to understand complex rules and their consequences on emotional levels; the ability to choose to risk those consequences, a capacity for empathy, and the ability to think abstractly."

Criticism

Gary Francione, while an animal rights advocate, criticizes the concept of granting personhood because the animal in question is human-like, and argues instead that sentience is the only characteristic a being requires to have basic rights. Therefore also other animals including mice and rats should be granted such rights.

Interpretation

Depending on the precise wording of any proposed or adopted declaration, personhood for the Great Apes may raise questions concerning protections and obligations under national and international laws, such as:

• Articles 7–29 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• The 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness regarding nationality and citizenship for persons
• Provisions 4 & 5 of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child

See also

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