the whales they hunt are not endangered.....
The recent confrontation in which a Japanese whaling ship, the Shonan Maru, collided with a boat attempting to block the ship's hunt, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's Ady Gil, brought back to the fore a controversy that turns on a whale-sized loophole in the International Whaling Commission protocol governing the hunting of whales worldwide.
Established when the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling was signed in 1946, the International Whaling Commission regulates the killing of whales worldwide in order to protect whale stocks, many of which had either been or were on the verge of being hunted to extinction. From 15 member states at its founding, the commission now includes representatives from 88 states that have signed the convention, including Japan.
IWC member states agree to abide by limits on the number of whales of various species that may be caught for commercial use, with a provision that allows for any member state to object to a restriction which it sees as harmful to its interests. States that so object need not abide by the restrictions. Japan invoked this provision of the IWC's whaling protocol to ignore a worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling the commission imposed in 1982, to begin in 1986.
Pressure from the United States, whose Congress approved legislation that forbade countries that did not abide by international fisheries protection agreements from fishing in American waters, led Japan to drop its objection in 1985 and agree to abide by the moratorium beginning in 1988. Yet Japanese whaling boats have caught more than 11,000 whales since that year.
Japan has been able to do this because of another provision in the IWC protocol that allows member states to issue permits to themselves to kill whales for scientific research purposes. Currently, Japanese boats take 1,300 whales a year under this provision of the protocol in two main regions: the North Pacific and the Antartic. Some of Japan's Antarctic whaling takes place in an area the IWC declared a whale sanctuary, which has raised the hackles of nearby Australia.
Most of the nations opposed to whaling, which now make up a slight majority of IWC members, argue that nonlethal methods exist for gathering the data about whale stocks the Japanese seek and that Japan's research whaling program is merely a cover for banned commercial whaling. The Japanese argue that the objections to their program are based partly in racism, an argument that gains some legitimacy when one considers that two other IWC member states, Iceland and Norway, conduct commercial hunts under objections to the moratorium, and some other states that observe the ban, including the United States, allow native peoples to continue subsistence hunting of whales.
The Japanese -- and the Icelanders and Norwegians -- argue that stocks of many whale species have recovered to the point where safe commercial catch quotas can be re-established; environmental groups like Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace, on the other hand, oppose all whaling on the grounds that it is unnecessarily cruel.
Written by Sandy Smith
For HULIQ.com
http://www.huliq.com/8738/90191/japanese-take-advantage-loophole-whaling-moratorium
