Whaling activist arrested by Japan

Saturday, March 13, 2010

The Japanese Coast Guard has arrested an anti-whaling activist of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society for "vessel invasion" after he boarded a Japanese whaling ship last month in the Southern Ocean.

The activist, Peter Bethune, from New Zealand, boarded the Japanese ship, the Shonan Maru 2, on February 15, and presented the captain of the ship a bill for $3 million in damages incurred when the Japanese vessel collided with and sank the Sea Shepherd trimaran Ady Gil. Immediately after boarding the vessel, Bethune was detained by the Japanese crew and held on board the ship for a month before it returned to Japan, where he was arrested by a waiting Coast Guard delegation and placed into custody in Tokyo.

The arrest has generated great publicity in Japan, where public opinion is generally in favor of whaling, and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is consistently criticized. Japan's whaling program, which the government says is a part of Japanese culture, results in the killings of around a thousand whales annually in hunts that the government claims are for scientific research. Activist groups such as Sea Shepherd, however, say that the program is a cover for commercial whaling, banned worldwide in 1986.

A member of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, Paul Watson, captain of another anti-whaling vessel, said that he thought the arrest of Bethune would provide greater support for their actions. He said that although the group has not been in contact with Bethune, he expected that his actions would make him an "international hero", particularly in his home country of New Zealand.

Have an opinion on this story? Share it!

Sources

"Japanese Coast Guard Arrests Anti-Whaling Skipper" — The New York Times, March 12, 2010
"Sea Shepherd hails arrested activist as 'international hero'" — ABC News, March 12, 2010

Share this:

This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.

Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.

The text of this article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License