An Argentine court has extended the application of Habeas Corpus to monkeys, and more precisely, in this case, to an orangutan. An 'animal rights' organization – AFADA – had asked a Buenos Aires court to rule on the detention of Sandra, an orangutan from the island of Sumatra kept in that city's zoo (orangutan means 'man of the forest' in Indonesian). AFADA argued that Sandra had sufficient cognitive functions to be considered a person and not be treated as an object. The judges agreed: Sandra, born in Germany and then transferred to the Buenos Aires zoo, could be considered a 'non-human person' and they prescribed her transfer to a 'zoological sanctuary', with far fewer constraints than the enclosures of a zoo.
AFADA officials are very pleased, and say that this decision can now be extended to many other "sentient beings, who are unfairly and arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in zoos, parks, circuses and laboratories" - said a lawyer of the AFADA, Raoul Buompadre. The decision by the Argentine judges differs from the recent one by a New York court which, in connection with a similar request involving Tommy, a privately held chimpanzee, had denied that the monkey was a person entitled to Habeas Corpus.
