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Concept
Great ape personhood
Summary
Great ape personhood is a movement to extend personhood and some legal protections to the non-human members of the great ape family: bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans.
Advocates include primatologists Jane Goodall and Dawn Prince-Hughes, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, philosophers Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, and legal scholar Steven Wise.
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 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 right 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 constitutional amendment, the first European Union member to do so.
New Zealand created specific legal protections for five great ape species in 1999. The use of gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans in research, testing or teaching is limited to activities intended to benefit these animals or its species. A New Zealand animal protection group later argued the restrictions conferred weak legal rights.
Several European countries (including Austria, the Netherlands and Sweden) have completely banned the use of great apes in animal testing. Austria was the first country to ban experimentation on lesser apes. Under EU Directive 2010/63/EU, the entire European Union banned great ape experimentation in 2013.
Argentina granted a captive orangutan basic rights in late 2014.
Official source
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