In response to a lawsuit filed by an animal rights organization, a New York judge "effectively recognized" two chimpanzees as
legal persons, the first time an animal has received such a designation, before amending her order.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe issued a writ of habeas corpus on Monday, which requires a person to be released from unlawful imprisonment, ordering the State University of New York at Stony Brook to defend its right in court to keep Hercules and Leo, who are research subjects,
according to NBC News.
The case was brought on the chimps' behalf by the Nonhuman Rights Project
— NhRP, which said in a statement that the judge's order "implicitly determined that Hercules and Leo are 'persons,'" NPR reports.
NhRP maintains that chimpanzees are autonomous and intelligent creatures and keeping them in captivity is tantamount to unlawful imprisonment, according to NBC. The group is asking that the primates be moved to a South Florida animal sanctuary from the Long Island university, where they are being used for research.
On Tuesday, a spokesman for the New York court system said the judge in the case mistakenly labeled her order as a writ of habeas corpus, something she has since amended, "striking out the words 'habeas corpus' from the document,"
The Wall Street Journal reports.
Jaffe granted the hearing to address the legal issues raised in the case, the spokesman clarified.
"It would be quite surprising if the judge intended to make a momentous substantive finding that chimpanzees are legal persons if the judge has not yet heard the other side's arguments," according to Pepperdine University law professor Richard Cupp, who opposes personhood for animals, NPR reported.
The NhRP, according to the Journal, is not challenging the chimps' conditions in confinement, but rather the confinement itself. The animals are part of research on evolutionary changes in SUNY Stony Brook's anatomical sciences department.
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