Greenlandic police on Monday arrested the prominent Canadian-American environmental activist Paul Watson in the capital of Nuuk, under an international arrest warrant issued by Japanese authorities, according to a police press release.
Watson, a co-founder of Greenpeace and founder of the Captain Paul Watson Foundation (CPWF), had docked in Nuuk aboard the ship John Paul Dejoria.
He did not resist arrest, according to the police.
Watson will be produced before the Sermersooq Circuit Court later today with a request to detain him until a decision is made on whether he should be extradited to Japan.
The Ministry of Justice holds the power to evaluate whether there are grounds for extraditing persons for prosecution in other countries.
CPWF says it believes Watson’s arrest warrant is related to a red notice issued over his “previous anti-whaling interventions in the Antarctic region”.
However, the CPFW says it is “completely shocked” by the arrest, “as the Red Notice had disappeared a few months ago”.
“We implore the Danish government to release Captain Watson and not entertain this politically-motivated request”, stated Locky MacLean, Ship Operation’s Director for CPWF.
Watson had “stopped in Greenland with 25 volunteer crew to refuel, en route to the North West Passage as a part of the CPWF’s Operation Kangei Maru, a mission to intercept Japan’s newly-built factory whaling ship Kangei Maru in the North Pacific”, according to a CPWF press release.
The Kangei Maru’s vast 13,000km range is fuelling speculation that Japan may be planning a return to whaling in the Southern Ocean, five years after abandoning the controversial practice, reports The Guardian.
In May, the ship’s owner Kyodo Senpaku dismissed those suspicions.
“We left the IWC [International Whaling Commission] and so at this point in time it is not under consideration,” said spokesperson Konomu Kubo.
Japan has been the focus of strong anti-whaling activism. Before 2019, Japan hunted whales in the Antarctic and North Pacific, which it claimed was for ‘scientific’ purposes.
It currently operates commercial whaling along its own coastline.
