BUENOS AIRES, Jan. 9 (UPI) -- In the eyes of Argentina's courts, female orangutan Sandra is a person -- or at least worthy of rights and protections similar to those of a human being. As Andrés Gil Dominguez, spokesperson for the Association of Professional Lawyers for Animal Rights in Argentina, puts it: she's no longer just an "object" in the eyes of the law.
It's the first time an animal has been granted expansive basic rights on par with a human. The decision was handed down by a high-level criminal appeals court in Buenos Aires last month; it's expected to spur action on some 17 similar cases, filed by animal rights activists on behalf of some 17 chimpanzees in zoos throughout Argentina.
"Considering that they are very close to human primates, it is an absurdity that they are still in captivity in prison," primatologist Aldo Giudice, a researcher at the University of Buenos Aires, told the Scientific American.
"Scientific research has shown that they are sentient beings with reason, self-consciousness and individuality," Giudice said. "We cannot be accomplices and let them suffer in prison."
A new hearing will soon be held to determine where -- in the best interests of an orangutan who's only known the confines of the Buenos Aires Zoo for the last 20 years -- Sandra should live out the rest of her days.
That such a legal victory for apes and their human defenders didn't arrive until now wasn't for lack of trying. Animals rights activists have attempted to win apes personhood throughout South America and in the U.S. for decades.
Lawyers and activists working with the Nonhuman Rights Project have filed a number of similar appeals on the behalf of chimps in New York in recent years. But appeals courts continue to reject the calls to grant Kiko, a chimp owned by a couple in Niagara Falls, habeus corpus -- the right to challenge a captor's legal authority to detain a prisoner (in this case an ape).
Judges in Kiko's case says the right of habeus corpus does not apply when the distinction is not confinement versus freedom, but one form of confinement versus another.
Lawyers working on behalf of Kiko say such logic ignores a long legal history of employing habeus corpus to transferring custody of child slaves or indentured servants from abusive owners to lawful guardians.
"Under the court's reasoning, an incompetent prisoner who could not care for herself but who was nevertheless illegally imprisoned would not be entitled to habeas," David Cassuto, an animal law scholar at Pace University, told Wired. "This is clearly erroneous."
And the victory in Argentina suggests judges might eventually come around to Cassuto's argument in the near future.
