PRESS RELEASE
GREAT APE PROJECT, INTERNATIONAL
MARCH 23, 2007

For More Information: Michele L. Stumpe, Esq.
President Great Ape Project, International
770-988-9972
mlstumpe@evindi.com

Beginning a movement that may propel Spain as a leader in animal welfare,
the Balearic Parliament has recently announced its approval of a resolution
to grant legal rights to great apes. The Balearic Islands are located in
the western Mediterranean Sea, near the eastern coast of the Iberian
Peninsula, and form one of the Autonomous Communities of Spain The Islands
are one of the most popular holiday destinations in all of Europe
Deputy Margalida Rossell� presented the Balearic Parliament with the
resolution early last summer, requesting a declaration of support for the
mission of the Great Ape Project, International - to legally grant great
apes freedom from torture, mistreatment and unnecessary death. This
resolution has also been presented to the Spanish Government and is expected
to be considered this summer after being deferred due to unrelated political
issues last year. According the Pedro Pozas, Executive Director of Great
Ape Project, Spain, ~Sthe decision of the Balearic Government to approve
this
Proposal, makes it a world-wide leader in the protection of the great apes
and their habitat, as well as in the support of their rights.~T
Opponents cite concern over granting ~Shuman~T rights to animals. However,
supporters are quick to point out that the resolution approved by the
Balearic Parliament and proposed to the Spanish Government does not seek to
grant great apes the same rights available only to humans. The proposition
simply recognizes basic legal protections supported by biological and
scientific evidence that great apes, like human children, experience an
emotional and intellectual conscience similar to that of human children.
For years, the scientific community has widely recognized that great apes
experience intense emotions such as fear, anxiety, happiness; can
independently solve puzzles and create and use tools; recognize the past and
plan for their future; and can learn to communicate in and unilaterally
teach a different language to their children.

By declaring its support of fundamental rights for great apes, the Balearic
Parliament has taken scientific evidence to the next level by establishing a
legal recognition that these creatures are conscious, self-aware beings that
should not be tortured, abused and neglected. The efforts by the Balearic
Parliament to stop the oppression of intelligent and self-aware beings who
cannot speak for themselves is an important step in the political arena of
animal rights.

For more information on this topic, visit www.greatapeproject.org or
www.proyectogransimio.org


Michele L. Stumpe, Esq.
President, Great Ape Project International

BIO:
Michele L. Stumpe, Esq. is an attorney and legal consultant in Atlanta, GA,
USA, who began working with gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans as a
teenager. Early in her career, Stumpe set out to combine her legal and
business talents with her passion for conservation and great ape rights.
She became the legal consultant to Gorilla Haven, the only gorilla sanctuary
in the USA, and also served on the legal advisory board to the Great Ape
Project, International. In 2005, she became a member of the Gorilla Haven
Board of Directors and was appointed as a Trustee for the organization. She
has volunteered at sanctuaries for great apes in Africa and the US. She
currently serves as the President of Great Ape Project, International.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6505691.stm

Should apes have human rights?
By Tom Geoghegan
BBC News Magazine

Apes and humans have common ancestors but should they have the same rights?
An international movement to give them "personhood" is gathering pace.
What would Aristotle make of it? More than 2,000 years after the Greek
philosopher declared Mother Nature had made all animals for the sake of man,
there are moves to put the relationship on a more equal footing.

Judges in Austria are considering whether a British woman, Paula Stibbe,
should become legal guardian of a chimpanzee called Hiasl which was abducted
from its family tribe in West Africa 25 years ago.

The animal sanctuary where he has lived is about to close and to stop him
being sold to a zoo, Ms Stibbe hopes that she can persuade the court he
deserves the same protection as a child.

-----------------------
APES AND US
Gorillas, bonobos, orang-utans and chimps are great apes
Chimpanzees and bonobos differ from humans by only 1% of DNA and could
accept a blood transfusion or a kidney
All great apes recognise themselves in a mirror
Elephants and dolphins show similar self-awareness
Great apes can learn and use human languages through signs or symbols but
lack the vocal anatomy to master speech
Great apes have displayed love, fear, anxiety and jealousy
In 1997 the UK government banned experiments on great apes but not on
primates such as marmosets and macaques
Sources: Ian Redmond, Charlotte Uhlenbroek
------------------------

Spanish MPs are also being urged to back a similar principle, one already
endorsed by the Balearic parliament and held dear by the international
organisation The Great Ape Project - that apes be granted the right to life,
freedom and protection from torture.

So should apes such as those at London Zoo, which opens its Gorilla Kingdom
on Thursday complete with gym and climbing wall, get the same rights as
their zookeepers?

They need greater protection in the eyes of the law, says Ian Redmond of the
UN's Great Apes Survival Project, who believes welfare groups could use
guardianship as a way to rescue ill-treated apes.

Some rights are conferred on apes but only because they are endangered. And
the international trade ban is flouted in Africa and South-East Asia, where
mothers are shot and their infants shipped off as pets, circus performers or
lab animals. Vivisection on apes is banned in much of Europe but still goes
on in the US and Japan.

"Apes are special because they are so closely related to us," says Mr
Redmond. "Chimpanzees and bonobos are our joint closest living relatives,
differing by only one per cent of DNA - so close we could accept a blood
transfusion or a kidney. Gorillas are next, then orang-utans."

But there is a stronger cognitive argument, he says, because the apes'
intelligence and ability to reason demands our respect.

"Show a gibbon a mirror and the reaction suggests he or she thinks the
reflection is another gibbon. But all the great apes have passed the 'mirror
self-recognition' test and soon begin checking their teeth or examining
parts of their body they couldn't see without the mirror. This
self-awareness surely suggests that they know they exist."


Family ties

Apes also share a range of human emotions, says zoologist Charlotte
Uhlenbroek, who thinks they should be afforded legal protection enshrined in
law.

They have a similar lifespan to humans and form strong family bonds which
they maintain for life, she says. And apes have displayed a tenderness which
could be described as love, anxiety when separated, and fear, jealousy and
trauma.

"If I was an alien from Mars and looked at human society and a society of
apes then in terms of the emotional life I would see no distinct difference,
although we live very different lives because of language and technology."

Giving them rights does not mean throwing open all the cage doors because
some zoos are important to preserve the species, but it is vital to
establish a principle that apes should not be treated like objects, she
says.

Daniel Sokol, a medical ethicist, says apes possess cognitive and emotional
faculties that make them worthy of moral consideration.

"Justice and consistent thinking require that we treat non-human animals who
share morally-relevant properties in a respectful way, and that surely means
giving them the opportunity to flourish and not be tortured or subject to
cruel or degrading treatment."

But Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University of London, says human
rights are a construct which can't be imposed on animals.

"Where do you stop? It seems to be that being human is unique and nothing to
do with biology. Say that apes share 98% of human DNA and therefore should
have 98% of human rights. Well mice share 90% of human DNA. Should they get
90% of human rights? And plants have more DNA than humans."

Chimps can't speak but parrots can. Defining creatures and allowing them
rights based on criteria invented by one group is itself an enormous breach
of human rights, he says, and one need look no further than Austria in 1939
to see why.

"Rights and responsibilities go together and I've yet to see a chimp
imprisoned for stealing a banana because they don't have a moral sense of
what's right and wrong. To give them rights is to give them something
without asking for anything in return."

There is a moral case to make about animal welfare, he says, but it has
nothing to do with science.

Article written by Jonathan Balcombe, whose book we had a thread about recently.....

http://www.star-telegram.com/245/story/103602.html

Humans have rights, should human-like animals?
30 May 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Kate Douglas

HIASL is a gregarious 26-year-old who enjoys painting, watching wildlife
documentaries and eating bananas. He's emotional, empathic and self-aware
and he shares 98.4 per cent of your DNA. But Hiasl is a chimpanzee, and so
has no more rights in law than a car or a television.

A growing number of people want to change all that. Campaigners across the
world are attempting to persuade governments to grant great apes
rudimentary "human rights". They argue that great apes are enough like us
to deserve special treatment over other animals. For Hiasl it's more than
a philosophical debate. The sanctuary near Vienna in Austria where he has
lived all his life is facing bankruptcy, and unless he is granted
"personhood" and allocated a human legal guardian he will be sold to the
highest bidder.

This month, a judge rejected Hiasl's case. Unless the Austrian appeal
court overturns the decision he and the other chimps at the sanctuary face
an uncertain future.

If Hiasl lived in Mallorca or any other of Spain's Balearic Islands the
story would be quite different. In February this year, the regional
parliament made history by becoming the first to recognise the individual
rights of chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans, giving them similar
status to a child or dependent adult. Any apes living in the Balearic
Islands are no longer property to be owned but instead are protected by
guardians, who must ensure that their rights to freedom from torture,
mistreatment and unnecessary death are being respected. The Spanish
parliament will decide this summer whether to follow suit for the rest of
Spain.

The campaign has gathered momentum over the past few years and is stirring
up a good deal of controversy. The Catholic Church and Amnesty
International point out that we have a long way to go to secure human
rights before we start thinking about animals. Other critics argue that
the move is not radical enough and should be extended to other intelligent
social animals such as elephants and dolphins, and potentially to all
animals. Meanwhile, all species of great ape face extinction in the wild -
possibly within your lifetime.

Planet of the apes

By voting for great- ape rights, the Balearics become the first region to
adopt the proposals of the Great Ape Project (GAP), an international
organisation that has been lobbying for legal rights for apes since 1993.
GAP began when philosophers Peter Singer, now at Princeton University, and
Paola Cavalieri from Italy brought together a group of academics,
including some of the world's leading primatologists, to consider the idea
of extending human rights to great apes. The result was a book, The Great
Ape Project: Equity beyond humanity, which contained 31 essays
highlighting the similarities between humans and great apes, challenging
readers to reassess their ethical assumptions and calling for an immediate
change in laws to recognise the personhood of these other species. After
the book came the organisation. GAP now has representatives in seven
countries, all working to persuade national governments and international
institutions such as the United Nations to change their laws.

The project has had some degree of success. New Zealand considered the
possibility of extending human rights to great apes in 1999 as part of its
new animal welfare bill. In the end, the bill did not go so far as
granting apes individual legal rights, but did give them special status.
Testing or teaching involving apes now requires government approval and
must demonstrate that any likely benefits are not outweighed by harm to
the individual animal. In effect, that means no biomedical testing, only
behavioural and physiological studies that increase our understanding of
these species.

The US took a smaller, but significant, step in December 2000 when the
CHIMP Act (the Chimpanzee Health Improvement Maintenance and Protection
Act) was signed into law. The act prohibits routine euthanasia of
chimpanzees that are no longer needed for medical research and commits the
federal government to funding their lifetime care in sanctuaries. Yet as
Michele Stumpe, a lawyer based in Atlanta, Georgia, and president of GAP
International, points out, there are still more great apes in captivity in
the US than anywhere else. GAP estimates there are at least 3000, with
around half of these used in medical research. "As an American, I'm
ashamed of that fact," she says.

Rights or wrongs

In Europe, apes have a much better time of it. The UK government banned
their use in biomedical research in 1997, Sweden and Austria have done
likewise, and after a similar move by the Dutch government in 2002,
research using great apes ceased at the Biomedical Primate Research Centre
at Rijkswijk, ending the practice in Europe.

So with all this legal protection already in place, what's the big deal
about individual rights? GAP campaigners say that these regulations don't
go far enough and they still allow people who own great apes to lawfully
neglect their needs. Stumpe points out that without rights animals are
mere property and their owners have no obligation to consider their best
interests. "You can do whatever you want with them." Legally, however,
only "persons" can have "rights", which is why the law needs to change to
recognise the "personhood" of apes.

Singer has been surprised by the world's reluctance to embrace the GAP
message. "We didn't think it was a great leap to ask for great-ape
rights," he says. "We saw it as an achievable aim." Having struggled to
get the message across for 14 years, though, even he now accepts that the
project is controversial.

Stumpe says that one reason for the resistance is the use of terms like
"rights" and "personhood". "It seems like an extremist or radical idea and
that scares people, but when we talk about rights, it really just means
protection in layman's terms," she says. For Singer, the opposition to GAP
runs deeper than just semantics. He says great apes are "the victims of
arbitrary discrimination", or what he calls "speciesism". He makes an
argument on moral grounds for extending the human rights to all beings
that show intelligence and awareness - including some level of
self-awareness - and have emotional and social needs. That means going
beyond the boundaries of our own species - and therein lies the problem.
"It's that gulf between humans and animals that people want to maintain,"
he says. Others take a similar view. "It's the next step in the Darwinian
debate - it requires a paradigm shift in people's ideas about themselves,"
says Ian Redmond, chief consultant for the UN Great Apes Survival Project.
Gary Francione, a leading animal-rights lawyer from Rutgers University in
Newark, New Jersey, and a member of the original GAP group, calls it
"spiritual superiority". "We just think we're special because we're
human."

Those less sympathetic to the animal-rights agenda see things rather
differently. Some argue that beyond the species barrier lies a slippery
slope. "Mice share around 90 per cent of human DNA: should they get 90 per
cent of human rights?" asks geneticist Steve Jones from University College
London. He is concerned that giving rights to great apes would be the
beginning of the end of all research with animals. Singer accepts that
there is a question about where you draw the line, but sees no reason for
that to stop society from taking the first step. "The strongest and
clearest case is with great apes, but we're open to arguments that it
could be extended to elephants, dolphins and other mammals," he says. He
wants a wide debate about how far we should extend "the community of
equals".

Some take it even further. Francione no longer supports the idea of
extending rights to great apes on the basis that their minds are like
ours. Instead, he argues that all sentient beings should have just one
right: the right not to be treated as the property of humans (New
Scientist, 8 October 2005, p 24). He believes his approach has the
advantage of simplicity, because sentience - the ability to feel pain or
distress - is an objective quality, and because it would bring an end to
captive animals altogether. It would make it illegal to breed any animals
- not just great apes, but everything, including farm animals and even pet
dogs and cats. His ideas highlight a logical inconsistency at the heart of
the GAP agenda: it seeks to give legal rights to animals but does not give
them the right to be free. Francione's approach is undoubtedly several
steps too far for many people, and whatever they may believe in private,
most campaigners for great-ape protection shy away from such an
uncompromising stance in public.

In a world where human rights are so often violated, some critics of the
GAP agenda see the debate as a luxury we cannot afford. Last year, with
the Spanish parliament due to vote on accepting the GAP agenda, the
Catholic Church and Amnesty International expressed just such misgivings.
The two groups have since made it clear that they are pro human rights
rather than anti animal rights. GAP for its part accepts that a bill of
rights for apes is not a priority for everyone.

When it comes to wild apes, there are probably more pressing concerns. The
primatologist Jane Goodall has recently commented that when she began
working in Africa 50 years ago there were at least a million chimps on the
continent. "Now there are perhaps only 150,000," she says. There may be as
few as 10,000 wild bonobos left. Orang-utan numbers are plummeting, and
the last few thousand animals could be killed off within a generation by
habitat destruction and poaching. Fewer than 5000 lowland gorillas remain,
and their extinction may be hastened by the deadly Ebola virus. Only
mountain gorilla numbers are increasing - to just 720 or so at the last
count.

It is not clear what GAP's proposals mean for wild apes, however, and even
some of the animals' most outspoken defenders are not convinced that
giving great apes human rights is the best way to protect them.
Primatologist Frans de Waal from the Yerkes Regional Primate Research
Center in Atlanta, Georgia, questions the GAP rationale of lobbying for
their rights. "The concept of rights applies only to those capable of
carrying responsibilities within our society," he says. He believes the
emphasis should be on the obligations humans have towards other animals,
both for their care and through conservation.

Redmond, on the other hand, suggests that applying GAP to wild populations
might lead to increased penalties for killing apes or even give them land
rights, though he concedes that the GAP agenda is extremely unlikely to be
taken up by any of the countries where these animals live. "One can
discuss this academically, but in practice even land rights for people are
not recognised in many of these place," he says. He is hopeful, however,
that if western countries embrace GAP, they could have influence in Africa
and Asia. Spain, for example, might help its former colony Equatorial
Guinea to improve the enforcement of wildlife law and the planning of land
use. At the very least, an increased regard for the well-being of apes
among people in western countries would lead to a decreased demand for
animals like Hiasl being kidnapped from the wild.

Whatever the outcome of Hiasl's case, the issue of how best to protect our
closest relatives isn't going away. Not everyone agrees that GAP's
campaign for rights is the right approach - some say it has alienated more
people from the cause of great-ape protection than it has attracted. But
if Spain adopts the GAP agenda later this year it will send a clear
message to the rest of the world. It's no longer about them and us. We
apes have got to stick together.

Worth fighting for?

The Great Ape Project's declaration argues for the legal extension of the
"community of equals" to include chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and
orang-utans and for the legal enforcement of the following rights:

1. THE RIGHT TO LIFE

The lives of members of the community of equals are to be protected.
Members of the community of equals may not be killed except in very
strictly defined circumstances, for example, self-defence.

2. THE PROTECTION OF INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY

Members of the community of equals are not to be arbitrarily deprived of
their liberty; if they should be imprisoned without due legal process,
they have the right to immediate release. The detention of those who have
not been convicted of any crime, or of those who are not criminally
liable, should be allowed only where it can be shown to be for their own
good, or necessary to protect the public from a member of the community
who would clearly be a danger to others if at liberty. In such cases,
members of the community of equals must have the right to appeal, either
directly or, if they lack the relevant capacity, through an advocate, to a
judicial tribunal.

3. THE PROHIBITION OF TORTURE

The deliberate infliction of severe pain on a member of the community of
equals, either wantonly or for an alleged benefit to others, is regarded
as torture, and is wrong.

Source: The Great Ape Project

>From issue 2606 of New Scientist magazine, 30 May 2007, page 46-49

I hope no-one minds me continuing to post on this subject, I find the concepts raised really fascinating. Here's the latest on Hiasl...

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jY-H040qXez0dzWag-SZzYF6yLrA

Court Won't Declare Chimp a Person
By WILLIAM J. KOLE

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - He's now got a human name - Matthew Hiasl Pan - but
he's having trouble getting his day in court. Animal rights activists
campaigning to get Pan, a 26-year-old chimpanzee, legally declared a person
vowed Thursday to take their challenge to Austria's Supreme Court after a
lower court threw out their latest appeal.

A provincial judge in the city of Wiener Neustadt dismissed the case earlier
this week, ruling that the Vienna-based Association Against Animal Factories
had no legal standing to argue on the chimp's behalf.

The association, which worries the shelter caring for the chimp might close,
has been pressing to get Pan declared a "person" so a guardian can be
appointed to look out for his interests and provide him with a home.

Group president Martin Balluch insists that Pan is "a being with interests"
and accuses the Austrian judicial system of monkeying around.

"It is astounding how all the courts try to evade the question of personhood
of a chimp as much as they can," Balluch said.

A hearing date for the Supreme Court appeal was not immediately set.

The legal tussle began in February, when the animal shelter where Pan and
another chimp, Rosi, have lived for 25 years filed for bankruptcy
protection.

Activists want to ensure the apes don't wind up homeless if the shelter
closes. Both were captured as babies in Sierra Leone in 1982 and smuggled in
a crate to Austria for use in pharmaceutical experiments. Customs officers
intercepted the shipment and turned the chimps over to the shelter.

Their upkeep costs about euro4,800 (US$6,800) a month. Donors have offered
to help, but there's a catch: Under Austrian law, only a person can receive
personal gifts.

Organizers could set up a foundation to collect cash for Pan, whose life
expectancy in captivity is about 60 years. But they contend that only
personhood will give him the basic rights he needs to ensure he isn't sold
to someone outside Austria, where he's now protected by strict animal
cruelty laws.

In April, a district court judge rejected a British woman's petition to be
declared Pan's legal guardian. That court ruled that the chimp was neither
mentally impaired nor in danger, the grounds required for an individual to
be appointed a guardian.

In dismissing the Association Against Animal Factories' appeal this week,
the provincial court said only a guardian could appeal. That doesn't apply
in this case, the group contends, since Pan hasn't gained a guardian.

There is legal precedence in Austria for close friends to represent people
who have no immediate family, "so he should be represented by his closest
friends, as is the case," said Eberhart Theuer, the group's legal adviser.

"On these grounds we have appealed this decision to the Supreme Court in
Vienna," he said.

Until this summer, the chimp was known simply as Hiasl. However, in the
latest court documents, he was identified with a little more dignity - if
not humanity - as Matthew Hiasl Pan, with the last name derived from
"chimpanzee."

The Association Against Animal Factories points out that it's not trying to
get Pan declared a human, but rather a person, which would give him some
kind of legal status.

Otherwise, he is legally a thing. And with the genetic makeup of chimpanzees
and humans so strikingly similar, it contends, that just can't be.

"The question is: Are chimps things without interests, or persons with
interests?" Balluch said.

"A large section of the public does see chimps as beings with interests," he
said. "We are looking forward to hear what the high court has to say on this
fundamental question."

Not directly related to the articles above but I thought I'd add this article here as it's not really on-topic and more related to animal rights....


http://www.guardian.co.uk/animalrights/story/0,,2184223,00.html

Comment

The murder of Johnny

He may have been a bit of a thug, but he was shot down simply for being a
nonhuman ape

Paola Cavalieri
Friday October 5, 2007
The Guardian


Johnny was shot dead on Saturday, in the green meadows of Whipsnade. Here,
north of London, he lived with his friend Koko, and five other companions.
Johnny, in his 40s, was "a bit of a thug", according to some. Was this a
reason
to kill him? He wasn't attacking anyone, and had no gun. Surely whoever
pulled
the trigger was arrested, and the shooting investigated?
Not so. For Johnny was a chimpanzee, not a human. He was not a member of the
privileged club that enjoys basic moral rights. In fact, he was an object,
an
item of property under the law. That's why he could be deprived so lightly
of
his life. That's why he had been for decades deprived of his freedom. The
wildlife park was his prison; and when he did what any of us would have done
in
his place - escaped - he was shot dead.

Why this radical difference in treatment? Is it because chimpanzees are not
members of our biological group? But contemporary egalitarianism, condemning
racism and sexism, has rightly argued that individuals cannot be
discriminated
against on the basis of membership of a particular biological group - and
discrimination based on species membership is a form of biologism. Thus we
can
no longer treat nonhuman animals as second-class beings: the appeal to
"speciesism" is unacceptable.

Are we perhaps entitled to say that the richer inner life of humans entitles
them to more serious moral consideration? From an ethical point of view,
such a
hierarchical approach is intuitively detestable - it would imply that we
could
treat intellectually impaired humans differently. But it is also flawed in
the
case of the nonhuman great apes. Chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans are
our
closest relatives, sharing 98-99% of our DNA, and "great apes" is a natural
category only as long as it includes humans. Shouldn't we suppose that
Johnny
and his fellow beings are quite similar to us?

And so they are. The gestures with which they communicate are similar to
ours;
they are capable of complex cooperation and social manipulation; cultural
transmission includes teaching; and different societies produce distinctive
traditions with respect to tool-using and tool-making. Reason - this long
favoured mark of our superiority - is clearly detectable when they solve
social
problems by forming coalitions over access to power, food or sex; identify
and
cleverly use medicinal plants; or make choices appropriately motivated by
one's
beliefs, as when they follow a tit-for-tat strategy, helping helpers and
dismissing cheaters.

Finally, although language was long considered uniquely human, some nonhuman
great apes have recently learned the American sign language for the deaf -
developing a vocabulary of hundreds of terms and combining them in a manner
recognised as grammatical.

It is difficult not to conclude that chimpanzees - and gorillas, and
orang-utans - are the first nonhuman persons we have encountered. And the
conclusion does not change if we follow the contemporary ethical reflection
that a person is a being that can consider itself in different times and
places. The nonhuman great apes pass the test of self-recognition in
mirrors,
formulate and carry out plans, use personal pronouns, show embarrassment, or
even "think aloud" by signing to themselves.

People have the right to life, freedom and welfare. This is what Johnny
deserved. True, that "bit of a thug" couldn't be easily convinced to return
to
his prison. But he should never have been kept prisoner in the first place.

We would not shoot dead a human escapee. But there will come a time when
this
killing will be seen for what it is - murder.

· Paola Cavalieri is the co-editor of The Great Ape Project
apcavalieri@interfree.it

In case anyone is still interested in following this case.....


It's official: In Austria, a chimp is not a person

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22670956/?gt1=10755