It sounds like the script for a Hollywood comedy, but plans are being hatched in the United States to give chimpanzees the chance to file suits in a court of law. The head of software company RealNetworks, Rob Glaser, has contributed $1m (£690,000) to the effort while several academic figures have stepped forward to voice their approval.A chimpanzee can communicate on roughly the same level as a three or four-year-old human, using sign language. Children most certainly have legal status in the courts, even if guardians file actions for them. In the same way, third parties, such as animal rights activists, would be able to represent the chimpanzees in the courts."If a human four-year-old has what it takes for legal personhood, then a chimpanzee should be able to be a legal person in terms of legal rights," Steven Wise, a Harvard University lecturer and author of a book, Rattling the Cage, told The Wall Street Journal.

He noted that the primates share 98.7 per cent of their DNA with human beings.Questions will be asked, however. Is this not a case of America taking its affection for litigation to almost barmy extremes? And where will it end? What about cats and dogs? And goldfish?Chimpanzees have attracted attention because they are the closest to us in demeanour and intelligence. And there are myriad temptations to mistreat them, because they are so useful in medical research.Accordingly, some in the biomedical profession are already mobilising to thwart the Chimpanzee Collaboratory. "The chimpanzee example is the beginning of what we view as a slippery slope," suggested Frankie Trull, president of the National Association for Biomedical Research."What concerns us is the increasingly litigious nature of those who believe that no animal should be used for any reason.". Two of the schoolboys were 14, the other was 15; they were internet surfers in the local cyber cafe, one of them idling his hours away drawing children's cartoons; all three were football enthusiasts. Hours after they had been shot dead by the Israeli army near the Jewish settlement of Netzarim, their fathers received the three young bodies.

They had been driven over by an armoured vehicle which – in 14-year-old Ismail Abu-Nadi's case – cut his corpse in half. But even Hamas, creator of the vicious Palestinian campaign of suicide bombing, admits that the three schoolchildren ­ all ninth-graders in the Salahadin School in Gaza City ­ had naively planned to attack the settlement of their own accord and with, at most, knives. It urged preachers and schoolteachers to tell children that they should never embark on such wild schemes again.And when the three boys' fathers talked to The Independent yesterday, they told a story of waste and tragedy and childhood anger at Israel's bloody invasion of the Jenin refugee camp. "I spent all last night asking myself why my son did this,'' Mohamed Abu-Nadi told me as we sat among mourners outside his middle-class home "Did Ismail need money? No Did he fail at school? No He was first in his class Were there problems with his family or friends? No I asked myself the same questions over and over. Why? Can you tell me?''It's a painful question to be asked by a distraught father, a highly educated civil engineer.