Courts sometimes have to make difficult decisions about whether something is in a legal category. Is, for instance, a sawn-off piano leg an offensive weapon? Sometimes even human categories can be a challenge. Is a woman married if, after she and her partner have said “I do” at their wedding, she stops the ring going fully on her finger and runs out shouting that she’s changed her mind? An Australian court in 1953 said yes, and that, wait for it, Mrs Quick was married to Mr Quick.

But new ground was broken recently when the Supreme Court of Austria was asked to rule that Matthew Hiasl Pan is a person. That sounds easy enough for even an inexperienced lawyer. But the challenge was that Matthew is a chimpanzee.

An animal-rights group, VGT, had tried to have Matthew declared a person so that a lawyer could be appointed as his guardian when the shelter where the chimp had lived for 25 years closed. Donors had raised money for the chimp, but under Austrian law, only a person may benefit from a scheme such as VGT proposed.

The campaign group, based in Vienna, argued that Matthew should be declared a legal person as chimpanzees share 99.4 per cent of DNA with humans. But the court dismissed the case on the grounds that VGT wasn’t authorised to make the appeal on Matthew’s behalf since he was neither a mentally handicapped person nor in any immediate danger.

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Matthew is sweet and it would be unfortunate if no legal mechanism could be found to enable him to be given a good place to live. The defeated group said it would take the case to the European Court of Human Rights. If they win, though, I think the name of the court will have to be changed.

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University

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