It is commom sense to affirm  that if you are talking about persons you are talking about humans.  In fact, it is not so, since we have granted legal status of personhood to foundations or corporations, and for creationists there are divine persons. We believe that it is time to fix this to great apes.

Primatology is a very young science: there are only a few decades since we begin to investigate who really are our closest living biological relatives (bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans, the great apes). And what we have learned always surprise us: in their high emotional and cognitive abilities, they are very close to ourselves.

For years, Joseph Fletcher (1905-1991), one of the creators of modern bioethics, offered an extensive and well-known fifteen features set to define human personality: minimal intelligence, self-control, sense of time, sense of future, sense of past, ability to relate to others, concern and care for others, communication, control of existence, curiosity, ability to adaptation, balance of reason and feelings, idiosyncrasy and neocortex activity. Today we know that all great apes and humans not only have these 15 characteristics or attributes of personality, but in varying degrees: the self-awareness of a gorilla is undoubtedly simpler than that of a human being.

All hominids (humans and great apes) have extensive, rich and interesting lives, with a lot of plans and expectations. The establishment of emotional bonds is so severe that death haunts our family and friends. Our emotional long-term memory will always remember suffering and torture; our concern for others makes us fear the suffering of our loved ones and our ability to project ourselves into the future will make us fear the return of mistreating and its consequences. We feel angry when we are imprisoned with no reason and are forced to have a different life of the one we wanted. And being intensely social, cultural and curious beings, with brains designed to continuously process new data, a prison can make you die of boredom and loneliness, as if we were buried alive .

Therefore, it is not justified to treat the great apes as things in our normative frameworks (legal, political and moral) . On the other hand, without considering values ​​like biophilia and sustainability, the future prospects of our own species is very bleak in a world subjected to severe ecological and social crisis we ourselves have caused. Expanding the thoughts beyond the barrier of our species, not only on the basis of the recognition of the capacity of great apes, but also on the moral obligation to respect the life of sentient animals who are subjects of their own life, would imply a breakthrough in this desirable change of values.

The law should treat all hominids as persons, and not as “things”. For all this, we require the recognition of the great apes as non human persons and actively will support the needed changes for such recognition exists in the legal system.

GAP Project Spain and GAP Project International

To support the manifest, send an email with the information below to nautilusmar@yahoo.es. The idea is to collect at least 2000 signatures to present the proposal to UN.

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