The Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) is an American nonprofit animal rights organization seeking to change the legal status of at least some nonhuman animals from that of property to that of persons, with a goal of securing rights to bodily liberty (the right not to be imprisoned) and bodily integrity (the right not to be exploited or experimented on). The organization works largely through state-by-state litigation in what it determines to be the most appropriate common law jurisdictions and bases its arguments on existing scientific evidence concerning self-awareness and autonomy in nonhuman animals. Its sustained strategic litigation campaign has been developed primarily by a team of attorneys, legal experts, and volunteer law students who have conducted extensive research into relevant legal precedents. The NhRP filed its first lawsuits in December 2013 on behalf of four chimpanzees held in captivity in New York State. In late 2014, NhRP President Steven Wise and Executive Director Natalie Prosin announced in the Global Journal of Animal Law that the Nonhuman Rights Project was expanding its work into other countries, beginning in Switzerland, Argentina, England, Spain, Portugal, and Australia.
The Nonhuman Rights Project was one of Animal Charity Evaluators' Standout Charities from 2015 to 2019.
History Founded by attorney Steven M. Wise, the Nonhuman Rights Project began in 2007 as a project of the Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights. In 2012, the Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights officially changed its name to the Nonhuman Rights Project.
Mission and goals According to the NhRP's website, the mission of the Nonhuman Rights Project is, through education and litigation, to change the common law status of at least some nonhuman animals from mere "things", which lack the capacity to possess any legal right, to "persons", who possess such fundamental rights as bodily integrity and bodily liberty and those other legal rights to which evolving standards of morality, scientific discovery, and human experience entitle them. To advance this mission, the NhRP's specific goals are: To persuade a United States state high court to declare that a specific nonhuman animal is a legal person who possesses the capacity for a specific legal right. To persuade US state high courts to increase the number of legal rights of any nonhuman animal who is declared to be a legal person to the degree to which it should be entitled. To persuade US state high courts to declare that appropriate nonhuman animals possess the capacities for legal rights and to extend legal rights to them accordingly. To educate the legal profession and judiciary about the legal, social, historical and political justice of the Nonhuman Rights Project's arguments. To communicate to the public and media the NhRP's mission and the justice of recognizing specific nonhuman animals as legal persons. To educate the courts, the legal profession, the media, and the public about the state of current knowledge about the cognition of those nonhuman animals who are, or who might be, plaintiffs in the Nonhuman Rights Project's lawsuits.
Legal claims The NhRP argues that nonhuman animals who are scientifically proven to be self-aware, autonomous beings, such as great apes, elephants, dolphins, and whales, should be recognized as legal persons under U.S. common law, with the fundamental right to bodily liberty. According to the NhRP, there is nothing in the common law that suggests that legal personhood is limited only to human beings, and certain species fit the profile that courts have used in the past to recognize legal personhood. The NhRP emphasizes the fact that currently all nonhuman animals are considered merely property, or legal "things", without the capacity for rights. In an article published five months before the NhRP first filed suit, Chris Berdick of Boston Globe explains the organization's claims and strategy as follows:
Somerset v. Stewart The NhRP's legal claims on behalf of captive nonhuman animals are based in part on the case of Somerset v Stewart. In that 1772 case, William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, the chief justice of the English Court of King's Bench, issued a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of a slave named James Somerset; Somerset was subsequently freed. NhRP argues that it was the first time a human slave was considered to be a person and who was allowed to petition for and be granted the writ for habeas corpus. The decision was made even though there was no precedent that it relied on. The NhRP views the writ of habeas corpus as a powerful form of redress for the denial of their plaintiffs' right to bodily liberty. Commenting on the importance of the Somerset case to the NhRP in a 2014 article by Charles Siebert in The New York Times Magazine, Wise said:
Opposition and counterarguments Some legal scholars have publicly opposed the NhRP's mission and goals. Federal appeals judge Richard Posner, for example, is opposed to legal personhood for nonhuman animals on the basis that the law grants humans special status not because of their intelligence but out of "a moral intuition deeper than any reason that could be given for it and impervious to any reason that you or anyone could give against it." Attorney and Pepperdine Professor of Law Richard Cupp has argued that animal welfare laws should be sufficient for ensuring the well-being of captive nonhuman animals and that the NhRP's strategy is unnecessarily extreme. In an interview with James Gorman of The New York Times following the organization's first lawsuits, Cupp said, "The courts would have to dramatically expand existing common law for the cases to succeed." In response, the NhRP argues that an animal welfare approach is insufficient and ineffective in terms of ending the practice of keeping chimpanzees and other cognitively complex nonhuman animals in captivity and also does nothing to address the larger issue of their status as legal property.
Court cases Tommy, Kiko, and Hercules and Leo The NhRP filed its first lawsuits on December 2, 2013, in New York State on behalf of four captive chimpanzees, demanding that the courts grant them the right to bodily liberty via the writ of habeas corpus and to immediately send them to a sanctuary affiliated with the North American Primate Sanctuary Alliance.
The NhRP's New York plaintiffs were Tommy, a privately owned chimpanzee living in a cage in a shed on a used trailer lot in Gloversville, New York; Kiko, a privately cared for chimpanzee living on private property in Niagara Falls, New York; and Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees cared for by New Iberia Research Center and loaned to the Anatomy Department at Stony Brook University for use in locomotion research. In response to the lawsuit, Tommy's owner, Patrick Lavery, defended the chimpanzee's living conditions: "He's really got it good. He's got a lot of enrichment. He's got color TV, cable and a stereo."
All of the petitions were rejected. On March 19, 2015, the case of Hercules and Leo was refiled, and on April 20, 2015, Justice Barbara Jaffe issued an Order to Show Cause and Writ of Habeas Corpus. A hearing was scheduled at which the State University of New York at Stoney Brook was ordered to show why Hercules and Leo should be not be released and transferred to the Save the Chimps sanctuary. Because the order's title included the phrase "WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS" it made headlines around the world and was misinterpreted as granting the right to liberty to a chimpanzee. Justice Jaffe's order was amended and refiled with the phrase WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS manually crossed out. A hearing was held on May 27 and on July 29, 2015, Justice Jaffe issued an order denying Hercules and Leo's petition. Because the petition was reviewed as well as the reasoning in the decision, NhRP considered it to be a "one giant leap for the Nonhuman Rights Project in its fight for the fundamental rights of nonhuman animals".
Petition for a writ of habeas corpus In filing the petitions NhRP's intent was:
To have the chimpanzees recognized as human-like beings with a common law right to liberty, specifically, to be recognized as autonomous and self-determining beings that cannot be legally considered as property. and To have the chimpanzees released and transferred to a North American Primate Sanctuary Alliance (NAPSA) sanctuary.
A writ of habeas corpus allows an individual to assert one's right to liberty and demand for release from unlawful imprisonment. The right to file the writ is protected in the US Constitution under Article 1, Section 9, and in New York State it is to be filed under article 70 which states that "a person illegally imprisoned or otherwise restrained with his liberty within the state ... may petition without notice for a writ of habeas corpus to inquire into the cause of such detention and for deliverance." In order for their petitions to be considered, NhRP had to first show that the chimpanzees are persons who could file them.
NhRP's arguments were partially based on precedent, a legal term that encompasses all previous legal decisions and reasoning also known as common law. These cases can be considered to be relevant and sometimes decisive to the current facts and circumstances at hand. As its first step, NhRP argued that the legal term person is not a synonym for a human being, but instead refers to an entity with a capacity to possess legal rights. It emphasized that there are no necessary conditions for determining that an entity is a legal person, and that going back to the 18th century there have been cases granting legal rights to non-human entities such as corporations. NhRP argued that the fact that a chimpanzee is not a human being should not prevent the argument that it is a legal person with a habeas corpus right to liberty.
It then made its central point, that based on previous common law decisions such as Somerset v Stewart, autonomy and self-determination are the human qualities that are intended to be protected by the writ of habeas corpus. And because chimpanzees are now known to possess the same qualities, the habeas corpus right to liberty should be expanded to the chimpanzee species. More than thirty pages of the petition were devoted to going over chimpanzee evolutionary development, neurology, social practices and complex cognition. NhRP argued that a chimpanzee possesses qualities such as:
NhRP emphasized that it was not seeking a granting of human rights for its plaintiffs but only a narrow expansion of the right to bodily liberty protected by the writ of habeas corpus.
Initial holdings All three petitions where denied on the grounds that the chimpanzees were not persons and thus the issues in the petitions would not be considered. In an hour long hearing regarding Tommy's Third District case, the Hon. Joseph Sise stated that:
The judge in Kiko's Fourth district case, the Hon. Ralph A. Boniello III, also held a hearing, denying the NhRP's petition on the grounds that Kiko is not a person for purposes of habeas corpus and stating that he did not want to be the first "to make that leap of faith". The judge in Hercules' and Leo's Second District case, the Hon. W. Gerard Asher, did not hold a hearing, writing in a decision that he was denying the petition for habeas corpus on the basis that chimpanzees are not considered legal persons.
Appeals Tommy's case