Captain Paul Watson (CPWF) was arrested on Sunday aboard his burning ship in Nuuk, Greenland, to refuel in preparation for the “capture” of a new Japanese whaling ship in the North Pacific, the foundation said from Captain Paul Watson (CPWF). press release.
A video posted on social media by CPWF shows police officers handcuffing Paul Watson aboard the John Paul DeJoria, then placing him in a police van before taking him away. Police in Denmark’s self-governing territory of Greenland said in a press release that he will be brought before a court to make a decision on his arrest “before deciding whether to extradite him to Japan.”
Direct confrontation with whaling ships
Paul Watson founded the Sea Shepherd and CPWF organizations and caused controversy with his tactics of direct confrontation with whaling vessels at sea.
According to CPWF, he was arrested on an Interpol red notice for previous actions involving his disappearance and retrieval in Antarctica. “It appears that Japan withheld the notice to facilitate Paul’s travel with the intention of arresting him,” the foundation said in a press release. The Japanese government has not reacted to this arrest.
The Japan Coast Guard “will continue to take appropriate measures in coordination with relevant agencies,” a Coast Guard spokesman said.
Japan defends whaling
Paul Watson’s flagship was en route to the Northwest Passage – the sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Canadian Arctic archipelago – as part of a campaign to “intercept the recently built Japanese factory ship Kangei Maru in the North Pacific”.
Japan defends whaling as a matter of “food security” in the resource-poor country, which imports large quantities of the animal’s meat. However, its consumption has decreased to about 2000 tons per year, while it was 200 times more in the 1960s.
Japan left the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 2019 to be exempted from the global moratorium on whaling. So, again, it captures whales clearly for commercial purposes, but limits itself to its own marine space. CPWF suspects that Japan wants to resume whaling in the Southern Ocean and North Pacific high seas by 2025. According to him, the reactivation of the red notice against Paul Watson is “politically motivated, coinciding with the launch of a new factory ship”.