Dear John,

In late 2021, The Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School (ALPP) and the Nonhuman Rights Project jointly filed an amicus curiae brief with the Constitutional Court of Ecuador, urging it to recognize that nonhuman animals can have legal rights after it decided to take up the issue of nonhuman animals’ legal status in response to a case involving a woolly monkey. In a landmark ruling, the Court has done so.

The ruling not only elevates the legal status of animals under Ecuador’s constitutional rights of nature but also requires that new legislation be drafted to protect the rights of animals.

On March 24th at 12:45 p.m. ET, NhRP President Steven M. Wise will discuss this exciting news in a panel discussion as part of Harvard Law School’s Animal Law Week 2022. The panel discussion is virtual and open to the public. Register here [[link removed]] . Also on the panel are leading Ecuadorian environmental lawyer Hugo Echeverría, who brought the case to the attention of the NhRP, and Professor Kristen Stilt and Research Fellow Macarena Montes of the ALPP.

The Court found by a vote of seven to two that the scope of the rights of nature includes animals and thus animals are the subject of rights. The Court also indicated that habeas corpus could be an appropriate action for animals and that they may possess rights that derive from other sources in addition to the Constitution. The Court’s detailed ruling directly refers to the brief submitted by the ALPP and the NhRP. Learn more about the case and ruling in this [[link removed]] detailed blog post, which includes links to the ruling in Spanish and English.

As reported on by The New Statesman (“ Could Happy the elephant follow an Ecuadorian monkey into legal personhood? [[link removed]] ”), this ruling is a huge step forward in the global struggle for nonhuman rights, and we hope and expect fundamental legal change for animals in the United States isn’t far behind. In February, we sent a letter to the New York Court of Appeals to inform them of the ruling and encourage them to take it into consideration in our elephant client Happy’s case [[link removed]] . Later this year, as explored in recent stories in The New Yorker [[link removed]] and The Atlantic [[link removed]] , the New York Court of Appeals will become the highest English-speaking court to hear arguments in support of nonhuman rights.

In this time of catastrophic climate crisis and the sixth mass extinction of species, the Constitutional Court of Ecuador’s judgment constitutes one of the most important legal advances in the field of nonhuman rights and environmental law in recent years. Until this ruling, legal practitioners, scholars, and advocates have centered the protection of nature on ecosystems and species, not individuals. Moreover, much of the work on the rights of nature did not consider animals as rightsholders. The Court’s groundbreaking ruling advances the constitutional protection of animals—ranging from the level of species to the individual animal—with their own inherent value and needs.

Thank you for being in this fight with us, and we hope to see you tomorrow!

Lauren Choplin
Communications Director, the NhRP

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