I'd like to have you look at this pencil. It's a thing. It's a legal thing. And so are books you might have or the cars you own. They're all legal things. The great apes that you'll see behind me, they too are legal things.
Voleo bih da pogledate ovu olovku. To je predmet. Pravno gledano. Kao i knjige ili automobili koje imate. Sve su to, pravno gledano, predmeti. Veliki majmuni koje ćete videti iza mene, i oni su, pravno gledano, predmeti.
Now, I can do that to a legal thing. I can do whatever I want to my book or my car. These great apes, you'll see. The photographs are taken by a man named James Mollison who wrote a book called "James & Other Apes." And he tells in his book how every single one them, almost every one of them, is an orphan who saw his mother and father die before his eyes. They're legal things.
Tako ja predmetu mogu da uradim ovo. Mogu da uradim šta god hoću svojoj knjizi ili automobilu. Videćete ove velike majmune. Fotografisao ih je čovek po imenu Džejms Molison, koji je napisao knjigu „Džejms i ostali majmuni“. On u toj svojoj knjizi kaže kako je svaki među njima, gotovo svaki među njima, jedno siroče kome su majka i otac pred očima umrli. Oni su, pravno gledano, stvari.
So for centuries, there's been a great legal wall that separates legal things from legal persons. On one hand, legal things are invisible to judges. They don't count in law. They don't have any legal rights. They don't have the capacity for legal rights. They are the slaves. On the other side of that legal wall are the legal persons. Legal persons are very visible to judges. They count in law. They may have many rights. They have the capacity for an infinite number of rights. And they're the masters. Right now, all nonhuman animals are legal things. All human beings are legal persons.
Tako je vekovima postojao ogromni pravni zid koji razdvaja predmete od osoba. Sa jedne strane, predmeti su nevidljivi sudijama. Oni se ne računaju u zakonu. Oni nemaju nikakva prava. Oni nemaju ni kapacitet za bilo kakva prava. Oni su robovi. Sa druge strane tog pravnog zida su osobe. Osobe su veoma vidljive sudijama. One se računaju u zakonu. Mogu imati mnoga prava. One imaju kapacitet za bezbroj prava i one su gospodari. Trenutno su sve neljudske životinje, pravno gledano, predmeti. Sva ljudska bića su po zakonu osobe.
But being human and being a legal person has never been, and is not today, synonymous with a legal person. Humans and legal persons are not synonymous. On the one side, there have been many human beings over the centuries who have been legal things. Slaves were legal things. Women, children, were sometimes legal things. Indeed, a great deal of civil rights struggle over the last centuries has been to punch a hole through that wall and begin to feed these human things through the wall and have them become legal persons.
Međutim, biti čovek i biti po zakonu osoba nikad nije bilo, niti je danas, sinonim za osobu po zakonu. Ljudi i osobe po zakonu nisu sinonimi. Sa jedne strane, bilo je mnogo ljudskih bića tokom vekova koji su po zakonu bili predmeti. Robovi su po zakonu bili stvari. Žene i deca su ponekad bili stvari. Zapravo, veliki deo borbe za građanska prava kroz vekove bio je da probije rupu kroz taj zid i počne da hrani one ljudske stvari kroz taj zid i da od njih napravi zakonski osobe.
But alas, that hole has closed up. Now, on the other side are legal persons, but they've never only been limited to human beings. There are, for example, there are many legal persons who are not even alive. In the United States, we're aware of the fact that corporations are legal persons. In pre-independence India, a court held that a Hindu idol was a legal person, that a mosque was a legal person. In 2000, the Indian Supreme Court held that the holy books of the Sikh religion was a legal person, and in 2012, just recently, there was a treaty between the indigenous peoples of New Zealand and the crown, in which it was agreed that a river was a legal person who owned its own riverbed.
Ali, avaj, ta rupa se zatvorila. Sa druge strane su, pravno gledano, osobe, ali one nikad nisu bile ograničene na ljudska bića. Primera radi, postoje mnoge osobe po zakonu koje čak nisu ni žive. U Sjedinjenim Državama, svesni smo činjenice da su korporacije pravno gledano osobe. U Indiji pre nezavisnosti, na sudu je važilo da je hinduistički idol pravno gledano osoba, da je džamija pravno gledano osoba. Godine 2000. indijski Vrhovni sud smatrao je da su svete knjige religije sikizam pravno gledano osoba, a 2012. godine, znači nedavno, postignut je sporazum između domorodaca Novog Zelanda i Krune, u kome je zaključeno da je reka pravno gledano osoba koja poseduje sopstveno rečno korito.
Now, I read Peter Singer's book in 1980, when I had a full head of lush, brown hair, and indeed I was moved by it, because I had become a lawyer because I wanted to speak for the voiceless, defend the defenseless, and I'd never realized how voiceless and defenseless the trillions, billions of nonhuman animals are. And I began to work as an animal protection lawyer. And by 1985, I realized that I was trying to accomplish something that was literally impossible, the reason being that all of my clients, all the animals whose interests I was trying to defend, were legal things; they were invisible. It was not going to work, so I decided that the only thing that was going to work was they had, at least some of them, had to also be moved through a hole that we could open up again in that wall and begin feeding the appropriate nonhuman animals through that hole onto the other side of being legal persons.
E, sad, pročitao sam knjigu Pitera Singera 1980. godine, kada sam imao bujnu smeđu kosu, i zaista me je dirnula. Postao sam advokat jer sam hteo da govorim u ime onih koji ćute, da zaštitim nezaštićene, a nikad nisam shvatio koliko je biliona i milijardi nečovekolikih životinja koje su bespomoćne i ne govore. Tako sam počeo da radim kao zaštitnik prava životinja. Do 1985. godine shvatio sam da sam pokušavao da postignem nešto što je bukvalno nemoguće, zato što su svi moji klijenti, sve životinje čije sam interese pokušavao da zaštitim, bili predmeti; bili su nevidljivi. Nije funkcionisalo, pa sam odlučio da ono što će jedino funkcionisati biti da ih, bar neke od njih, provučemo kroz rupu koju smo ponovo mogli otvoriti u tom zidu i početi da hranimo odgovarajuće nečovekolike životinje kroz tu rupu sa druge strane, koji su pravno gledano osobe.
Now, at that time, there was very little known about or spoken about truly animal rights, about the idea of having legal personhood or legal rights for a nonhuman animal, and I knew it was going to take a long time. And so, in 1985, I figured that it would take about 30 years before we'd be able to even begin a strategic litigation, long-term campaign, in order to be able to punch another hole through that wall. It turned out that I was pessimistic, that it only took 28.
U to vreme, bilo je vrlo malo poznato i malo se govorilo istinski o životinjskim pravima, o ideji posedovanja zakonske ličnosti ili prava za nečovekoliku životinju, i znao sam da će za to trebati dosta vremena. Tako, 1985. godine, shvatio sam da će trebati oko 30 godina pre nego što budemo mogli i da započnemo stratešku parnicu, dugoročnu kampanju, kako bismo mogli da probušimo još jednu rupu u tom zidu. Ispalo je da sam bio pesimista; trebalo je samo 28 godina.
So what we had to do in order to begin was not only to write law review articles and teach classes, write books, but we had to then begin to get down to the nuts and bolts of how you litigate that kind of case.
Ono što smo morali da uradimo kako bismo počeli nije bilo samo da napišemo članke o predlozima zakona i podučavamo, pišemo knjige, već smo morali da krenemo od Kulina bana kako se parniči takva vrsta slučaja.
So one of the first things we needed to do was figure out what a cause of action was, a legal cause of action. And a legal cause of action is a vehicle that lawyers use to put their arguments in front of courts.
Jedna od prvih stvari koju je trebalo uraditi je shvatiti uzrok delovanja, pravni uzrok delovanja. A pravni uzrok delovanja je pokretač koji advokati koriste da svoje argumente stave pred sud.
It turns out there's a very interesting case that had occurred almost 250 years ago in London called Somerset vs. Stewart, whereby a black slave had used the legal system and had moved from a legal thing to a legal person. I was so interested in it that I eventually wrote an entire book about it.
Ispalo je da postoji vrlo zanimljiv slučaj koji se dogodio pre skoro 250 godina u Londonu, „Somerset protiv Stjuarta“, gde je rob crnac morao da upotrebi pravni sistem i promenio svoj status predmeta u status osobe. To me je toliko zanimalo da sam na kraju napisao čitavu knjigu o tome.
James Somerset was an eight-year-old boy when he was kidnapped from West Africa. He survived the Middle Passage, and he was sold to a Scottish businessman named Charles Stewart in Virginia. Now, 20 years later, Stewart brought James Somerset to London, and after he got there, James decided he was going to escape. And so one of the first things he did was to get himself baptized, because he wanted to get a set of godparents, because to an 18th-century slave, they knew that one of the major responsibilities of godfathers was to help you escape.
Džejms Somerset bio je osmogodišnjak kada je kidnapovan iz zapadne Afrike. Preživeo je Srednji prelaz i prodat je jednom škotskom biznismenu, Čarlsu Stjuartu, u Virdžiniji. Onda, 20 godina posle, Stjuart je doveo Džejmsa Somerseta u London, i nakon što je stigao tamo, Džejms je odlučio da će pobeći. Tako je jedna od prvih stvari koju je uradio bila da se krsti, zato što je želeo da dobije kumove, jer je rob u 18. veku znao da je jedna od glavnih odgovornosti kumova da ti pomognu u bežanju.
And so in the fall of 1771, James Somerset had a confrontation with Charles Stewart. We don't know exactly what happened, but then James dropped out of sight. An enraged Charles Stewart then hired slave catchers to canvass the city of London, find him, bring him not back to Charles Stewart, but to a ship, the Ann and Mary, that was floating in London Harbour, and he was chained to the deck, and the ship was to set sail for Jamaica where James was to be sold in the slave markets and be doomed to the three to five years of life that a slave had harvesting sugar cane in Jamaica. Well now James' godparents swung into action. They approached the most powerful judge, Lord Mansfield, who was chief judge of the court of King's Bench, and they demanded that he issue a common law writ of habeus corpus on behalf of James Somerset.
I tako je u jesen 1771. godine Džejms Somerset imao sukob sa Čarlsom Stjuartom. Ne znamo tačno šta se desilo, ali je onda Džejms nestao bez traga. Besni Čarls Stjuart je onda unajmio ljude koji su hvatali robove da prevrnu London naopačke da ga pronađu i, ne da ga vrate Čarlsu Stjuartu, već na brod „Anu i Mariju“, koji se nalazio u londonskoj luci, i bio je okovan lancima za palubu, a brod je trebalo da otplovi za Jamajku gde bi Džejms bio prodat na pijacama za robove i bio osuđen na tri do pet godina života kao rob u žetvi šećerne trske na Jamajci. Sad su Džejmsovi kumovi stupili na scenu. Došli su do najmoćnijeg sudije, lorda Mensfilda, glavnog sudije u Kraljičinom sudu, i zahtevali su od njega da izda sudski nalog habeas korpus po opštem pravu na ime Džejmsa Somerseta.
Now, the common law is the kind of law that English-speaking judges can make when they're not cabined in by statutes or constitutions, and a writ of habeus corpus is called the Great Writ, capital G, capital W, and it's meant to protect any of us who are detained against our will. A writ of habeus corpus is issued. The detainer is required to bring the detainee in and give a legally sufficient reason for depriving him of his bodily liberty.
E, sad, opšte pravo je vrsta zakona koji sudije iz engleskog govornog područja mogu da primene kada ih ne ograničavaju statuti ili ustavi, a sudski nalog habeas korpus je Vrhovni sudski nalog. sa velikim početnim slovom, a njegova uloga je da zaštiti svakoga ko je zatočen protiv svoje volje. Sudski nalog habeas korpus se izdaje. Onaj koji drži lice u zatočeništvu je dužan da ga preda i sa dovoljno argumenata obrazloži razlog oduzimanja slobode.
Well, Lord Mansfield had to make a decision right off the bat, because if James Somerset was a legal thing, he was not eligible for a writ of habeus corpus, only if he could be a legal person. So Lord Mansfield decided that he would assume, without deciding, that James Somerset was indeed a legal person, and he issued the writ of habeus corpus, and James's body was brought in by the captain of the ship.
E, pa, lord Mensfild je morao smesta da donese odluku, jer je Džejms Somerset zakonski gledano predmet; na njega nije mogao da se primeni habeas korpus, već jedino ako on pravno postane osoba. Tako je lord Mensfild odlučio da će pretpostaviti, bez odlučivanja, da je Džejms Somerset zakonski gledano zapravo osoba, i izdao je nalog habeas korpus, a Džejmsovo telo je vratio kapetan broda.
There were a series of hearings over the next six months. On June 22, 1772, Lord Mansfield said that slavery was so odious, and he used the word "odious," that the common law would not support it, and he ordered James free. At that moment, James Somerset underwent a legal transubstantiation. The free man who walked out of the courtroom looked exactly like the slave who had walked in, but as far as the law was concerned, they had nothing whatsoever in common.
Usledio je niz saslušanja u narednih šest meseci. Lord Mensfild je 22. juna 1772. godine izjavio da je ropstvo toliko ogavno, a upotrebio je reč „ogavno“, da ga opšte pravo neće podržati, i proglasio je Džejmsa slobodnim. U tom trenutku, Džejms Somerset podlegao je zakonskoj transsupstanciji. Slobodan čovek koji je izašao iz sudnice izgledao je potpuno isto kao rob koji je ušao, ali što se zakona tiče, njih dvojica nisu imali ništa zajedničko.
The next thing we did is that the Nonhuman Rights Project, which I founded, then began to look at what kind of values and principles do we want to put before the judges? What values and principles did they imbibe with their mother's milk, were they taught in law school, do they use every day, do they believe with all their hearts -- and we chose liberty and equality.
Sledeće što smo uradili je projekat „Prava za ne-ljude“, koji sam ja pokrenuo i onda počeo da gledam kakve vrednosti i principe želimo da izložimo sudijama. Kojim vrednostima i principima su oni zadojeni, da li su išli na Pravni fakultet, da li koriste svaki dan, da li svim srcem veruju - i mi smo odabrali slobodu i jednakost.
Now, liberty right is the kind of right to which you're entitled because of how you're put together, and a fundamental liberty right protects a fundamental interest. And the supreme interest in the common law are the rights to autonomy and self-determination. So they are so powerful that in a common law country, if you go to a hospital and you refuse life-saving medical treatment, a judge will not order it forced upon you, because they will respect your self-determination and your autonomy.
E, sad, pravo na slobodu je vrsta prava koja vam je data zbog toga što ste tako sačinjeni, i osnovno pravo na slobodu štiti osnovne interese. A najveći interes u opštem pravu su pravo na autonomiju i samoodlučivanje. Oni su tako moćni da u državi gde je na snazi opšte pravo, ako odete u bolnicu i odbijete medicinsku negu koja bi vam spasila život, sudija neće naložiti da vas okrive, zato što će poštovati vaše samoodlučivanje i autonomiju.
Now, an equality right is the kind of right to which you're entitled because you resemble someone else in a relevant way, and there's the rub, relevant way. So if you are that, then because they have the right, you're like them, you're entitled to the right. Now, courts and legislatures draw lines all the time. Some are included, some are excluded. But you have to, at the bare minimum you must -- that line has to be a reasonable means to a legitimate end. The Nonhuman Rights Project argues that drawing a line in order to enslave an autonomous and self-determining being like you're seeing behind me, that that's a violation of equality.
E, sad, pravo na jednakost je vrsta prava koja vam je data zato što ličite na nekog drugog na određen način, a tu je začkoljica, u određenom načinu. Tako da ako ste to, onda zato što oni imaju pravo, vi ste poput njih, zagarantovano vam je pravo. Sudovi i zakonodavstvo podvlače crtu sve vreme. Neki se nađu iznad, neki ispod. Međutim, vi morate da, makar minimum minimima, morate - ta crta mora da bude razumno sredstvo legitimnom cilju. Projekat „Prava za ne-ljude“ zalaže se da povlačenje te crte da bi se zarobilo autonomno i samoodlučujuće biće, poput ovog što vidite iza mene, predstavlja ugrožavanje jednakosti.
We then searched through 80 jurisdictions, it took us seven years, to find the jurisdiction where we wanted to begin filing our first suit. We chose the state of New York. Then we decided upon who our plaintiffs are going to be. We decided upon chimpanzees, not just because Jane Goodall was on our board of directors, but because they, Jane and others, have studied chimpanzees intensively for decades. We know the extraordinary cognitive capabilities that they have, and they also resemble the kind that human beings have. And so we chose chimpanzees, and we began to then canvass the world to find the experts in chimpanzee cognition. We found them in Japan, Sweden, Germany, Scotland, England and the United States, and amongst them, they wrote 100 pages of affidavits in which they set out more than 40 ways in which their complex cognitive capability, either individually or together, all added up to autonomy and self-determination.
Onda smo istraživali 80 jurisdikcija. Trebalo nam je sedam godina da nađemo jurisdikciju gde smo želeli da podnesemo prvu tužbu. Izabrali smo državu Njujork. Potom smo odlučili ko će nam biti tužioci. Odlučili smo se za šimpanze, ne samo zato što je Džejn Gudol bila u našem odboru direktora, već zato što su oni, Džejn i ostali, intenzivno proučavali šimpanze decenijama. Poznate su nam izvanredne kognitivne sposobnosti koje imaju, a one takođe liče na one koje imaju ljudska bića. Tako smo odabrali šimpanze i počeli smo da tražimo širom sveta kako bismo našli stručnjake za kogniciju kod šimpanzi. Našli smo ih u Japanu, Švedskoj, Nemačkoj, Škotskoj, Engleskoj i SAD-u, a oni su napisali 100 strana iskaza u kojima su na više od 40 načina izneli kako su njihove kompleksne kognitivne sposobnosti, bilo individualno ili zajedno, sve pripisane autonomiji i samoodlučivanju.
Now, these included, for example, that they were conscious. But they're also conscious that they're conscious. They know they have a mind. They know that others have minds. They know they're individuals, and that they can live. They understand that they lived yesterday and they will live tomorrow. They engage in mental time travel. They remember what happened yesterday. They can anticipate tomorrow, which is why it's so terrible to imprison a chimpanzee, especially alone. It's the thing that we do to our worst criminals, and we do that to chimpanzees without even thinking about it.
Uzevši ovo u obzir, primera radi, one su svesne, ali su one, takođe, svesne da su svesne. One znaju da imaju um. One znaju da drugi imaju um. One znaju da su individue i da mogu da žive. Razumeju da su živele juče i da će živeti sutra. Mogu mentalno da putuju kroz vreme. Pamte šta je bilo juče. One mogu predvideti sutra, zbog čega je tako strašno zatočiti šimpanzu, pogotovu samu. To je nešto što radimo najgorim kriminalcima, a to radimo i šimpanzama, a čak i ne razmišljamo o tome.
They have some kind of moral capacity. When they play economic games with human beings, they'll spontaneously make fair offers, even when they're not required to do so. They are numerate. They understand numbers. They can do some simple math. They can engage in language -- or to stay out of the language wars, they're involved in intentional and referential communication in which they pay attention to the attitudes of those with whom they are speaking. They have culture. They have a material culture, a social culture. They have a symbolic culture. Scientists in the Taï Forests in the Ivory Coast found chimpanzees who were using these rocks to smash open the incredibly hard hulls of nuts. It takes a long time to learn how to do that, and they excavated the area and they found that this material culture, this way of doing it, these rocks, had passed down for at least 4,300 years through 225 chimpanzee generations.
One imaju neku vrstu moralnog kapaciteta. Kada se igraju ekonomskih igara sa ljudskim bićima, one spontano prave fer ponude, iako se to od njih ne zahteva. One znaju brojeve. One razumeju brojeve. One rade prostu matematiku. One se uključuju u jezik ili ostaju izvan jezičkih ratova, uključuju se u namernu i referentnu komunikaciju u kojoj obraćaju pažnju na stavove onih sa kojima razgovaraju. One imaju kulturu. One imaju materijalnu kulturu, socijalnu kulturu. Imaju kulturu simbola. Naučnici u šumama Tai na Obali Slonovače pronašli su šimpanze koje su koristile kamen kako bi razbile neverovatno tvrdu opnu oraha. Potrebno je mnogo vremena da se to nauči, a oni su istraživali ovu oblast i otkrili da je ova materijalna kultura, da je ovakvo ponašanje, ovo kamenje, prelazilo sa generacije na generaciju najmanje 4 300 godina kroz 225 generacija šimpanzi.
So now we needed to find our chimpanzee. Our chimpanzee, first we found two of them in the state of New York. Both of them would die before we could even get our suits filed. Then we found Tommy. Tommy is a chimpanzee. You see him behind me. Tommy was a chimpanzee. We found him in that cage. We found him in a small room that was filled with cages in a larger warehouse structure on a used trailer lot in central New York. We found Kiko, who is partially deaf. Kiko was in the back of a cement storefront in western Massachusetts. And we found Hercules and Leo. They're two young male chimpanzees who are being used for biomedical, anatomical research at Stony Brook. We found them.
Sad je trebalo da pronađemo naše šimpanze. Naše šimpanze - prvo smo dve pronašli u državi Njujork. Obe će uginuti čak i pre nego što smo uspeli da podnesemo tužbu. Onda smo našli Tomija. Tomi je šimpanza. Vidite ga iza mene. Tomi je bio šimpanza. Pronašli smo ga u tom kavezu. Našli smo ga u maloj prostoriji koja je bila puna kaveza u velikom skladištu na parkingu za prikolice u centralnom Njujorku. Pronašli smo Kiko, koja je nagluva. Kiko je bila u zadnjem delu betonske zgrade u zapadnom Masačusetsu. Pronašli smo i Herkula i Lea. Oni su dva mlada mužjaka šimpanze. Koriste se za biomedicinska, anatomska istraživanja na Stouni Bruku. Pronašli smo ih.
And so on the last week of December 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed three suits all across the state of New York using the same common law writ of habeus corpus argument that had been used with James Somerset, and we demanded that the judges issue these common law writs of habeus corpus. We wanted the chimpanzees out, and we wanted them brought to Save the Chimps, a tremendous chimpanzee sanctuary in South Florida which involves an artificial lake with 12 or 13 islands -- there are two or three acres where two dozen chimpanzees live on each of them. And these chimpanzees would then live the life of a chimpanzee, with other chimpanzees in an environment that was as close to Africa as possible.
I tako, poslednje nedelje decembra 2013. godine, Projekat „Prava za ne-ljude“ podneo je tri tužbe širom države Njujork koristeći isti sudski nalog habeas korpus opšteg prava korišćen u slučaju Džejmsa Somerseta. Tražili smo da sudije izdaju tri naloga habeas korpus opšteg prava. Želeli smo da oslobodimo šimpanze, i želeli smo da ih dovedemo u „Spasimo šimpanze“, sjajno utočište za šimpanze u južnoj Floridi, u kome postoji veštačko jezero sa 12 ili 13 ostrva - imaju dva ili tri ara gde 24 šimpanze žive na svakom od njih. I ove šimpanze bi onda živele život šimpanzi, sa drugim šimpanzama u okruženju koje je maksimalno nalik Africi.
Now, all these cases are still going on. We have not yet run into our Lord Mansfield. We shall. We shall. This is a long-term strategic litigation campaign. We shall. And to quote Winston Churchill, the way we view our cases is that they're not the end, they're not even the beginning of the end, but they are perhaps the end of the beginning.
Svi ovi slučajevi su i dalje u toku. Još nismo naišli na našeg lorda Mensfilda. Ali hoćemo. Hoćemo. Ovo je dugoročna strateška parnička kampanja. I hoćemo. Da citiram Vinstona Čerčila, način na koji gledamo na naše slučajeve je da oni nisu kraj, oni nisu čak ni početak kraja, ali su zato možda kraj početka.
Thank you.
Hvala vam.
(Applause)
(Aplauz)