{"id":758137,"date":"2019-09-03T07:59:01","date_gmt":"2019-09-03T11:59:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=758137"},"modified":"2019-09-03T07:59:43","modified_gmt":"2019-09-03T11:59:43","slug":"nhrp-addresses-highest-court-in-colombia-in-chucho-bear-rights-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=758137","title":{"rendered":"NhRP Addresses Highest Court in Colombia in Chucho Bear Rights Case"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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Steven Wise, at the invitation of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, addressed a panel of nine judges during a hearing to determine whether Chucho the bear is a legal person with a fundamental right to liberty.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

LAUREN CHOPLIN:<\/strong> ‘On August 8, 2019, NhRP President Steven M. Wise, at the invitation of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, addressed a panel of nine judges during a hearing to determine whether a spectacled bear named Chucho is a legal person with the fundamental right to liberty protected by the writ of habeas corpus. In 2017, Chucho\u2019s attorney, Luis Domingo G\u00f3mez Maldonado, a law professor at the Universidad Manuela Beltr\u00e1n, filed an NhRP-inspired habeas corpus petition on the bear\u2019s behalf after learning that the Corporaci\u00f3n Aut\u00f3noma Regional de Caldas (Corpocaldas) had used its authority as the entity responsible for environmental management in the region to transfer him from the R\u00edo Blanco Nature Reserve to the Barranquilla City Zoo. In so doing, Luis argues, Corpocaldas had deprived Chucho of his right to liberty, severely compromising his physical and emotional well-being.<\/em><\/p>\n

In a first for Colombian animal law jurisprudence, Judge Luis Armando Tolosa Villabona agreed, granting the writ in July of 2017 and ordering Chucho transferred to a habitat with \u201cfull and dignified conditions in semi-captivity,\u201d most likely La Planada Nature Reserve, where other spectacled bears live in the cloud forests of the Andes\u2019 western slope… <\/em>A month later, a panel of the Colombian Supreme Court\u00a0reversed the ruling, writing that \u201cthe writ of habeas corpus is inappropriate in the present case, because it was designed for persons, rational animals, not for nonhuman or irrational animals, and the foundations of such a decision. <\/em>Luis then appealed Chucho\u2019s case to the Colombian Constitutional Court, which ordered a hearing. As Steve says in his video message, the question before the Court is \u201cwhether even the most fundamental interests of a species, like Chucho\u2019s, should ever, under any circumstances, count”.’<\/em>\u00a0 SOURCE…<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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