In line with the Danes, Santa Claus lives in Greenland, and his mailbox may be present in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk. Within the run as much as Christmas 2024, there was one high-profile resident of Nuuk, with a protracted, snow-white beard and flowing hair, who might simply have been mistaken for Father Christmas, apart from the truth that he was locked inside town’s jail.
Fortunately, Paul Watson was launched simply in time to spend Christmas together with his household in France. The Toronto-born environmentalist and anti-whaling activist had been held in Nuuk jail since July 2024, to await judgement by Danish authorities on whether or not he could be extradited to Japan. An Interpol purple discover issued on behalf of Japan accuses Watson of “Breaking into [a] Vessel, Harm to Property, Forcible Obstruction of Enterprise, Damage” (all of which Watson denies).
The vessel in query, Shonan Maru 2, belonged to Japan’s whaling fleet. Watson and others have lengthy accused Japan of illegally bypassing the Worldwide Whaling Commision’s ban on industrial whaling by claiming that its operations are for the needs of scientific analysis. In 2014, the Worldwide Court docket of Justice in The Hague agreed with Australia and New Zealand that Japan’s whaling actions had been unlawful.
In The Dialog, Gilles Paché, a professor of provide chains in Aix-Marseille College in France, supplies the cultural, historic and financial context for Japanese whaling operations, and concludes that “Watson’s strategy highlights the broader societal debate over the worldwide accountability to guard biodiversity and the boundaries of cultural relativism.”
“In Japan, Watson’s actions are sometimes seen as a provocative assault on a cultural custom, a perspective highlighted by some European media shops”, Paché explains. “Nonetheless, this narrative overlooks the highly effective industrial equipment behind Japanese whaling. Whereas custom performs a job, Japan’s whaling operations are additionally pushed by a government-supported industrial advanced”.
As Paché argues, appeals to Japanese “cultural authenticity” collapse whenever you take a look at the dwindling marketplace for whale meat (2,000 tons consumed yearly, in comparison with 230,000 tons within the Sixties), or examine the “small-scale, limited-impact methods of the previous” to “the industrialised operations Watson critiques immediately. In 2023 alone, Japan’s whaling fleet killed practically 300 whales, with authorities setting a 2024 goal of 200.”
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Interviewed by Hortense Chauvin for Reporterre again in September 2024, Watson additionally highlighted the shrinking urge for food for whale meat (“fewer than two % of Japanese individuals eat whale meat”), whereas additionally accusing a coterie of “ultranationalists” and yakuza members of perpetuating the business for their very own private acquire.
In a video launched by Vakita on 18 December, after the Danish Ministry of Justice determined towards Japan’s case for extradition, Watson offers particular due to the individuals of France, Emmanuel Macron and Hugo Clément. The latter is a French journalist and environmentalist who established Vakita in 2022 as an outlet for each “investigation and motion”. The outlet has mobilised the general public and campaigned for Watson’s launch since his arrest in July, and has produced unique video content material on the case.
Writing in Libération in late October, Thomas Legrand argued that France ought to renew its outdated custom of granting citizenship to freedom fighters, particularly environmental activists like Watson, who ought to be positioned “underneath the identical heroic banner” as those that fought towards twentieth-century totalitarianism.
Given Watson’s gratitude to France, it’s considerably ironic that, based on Michel Forst, the United Nations Particular Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders, France is “the worst nation in Europe” in terms of police repression of environmentalists.
“The violence of of the police forces is phenomenal”, Forst informed Emmanuel Clévenot for Reporterre. “Their counterparts overseas can not comprehend the style wherein the French reply to protests, nor can they comprehend how they may use such violence. […] Right here, tear gasoline and blast balls are used indiscriminately. ‘kettling’, regardless that forbidden, continues to be used. These are all abuses not seen in different international locations.” Whereas France would be the worst by way of police repression, Forst claims that the UK is the worst in terms of judicial repression, pointing to the (roughly) three-year jail sentences handed all the way down to Simply Cease Oil activists.
Forst additionally brings particular consideration to the function of journalists: “It is a unhealthy signal when journalists should make a behavior of sporting head to toe safety when overlaying protests. Journalists, whose exceptional work brings to gentle the connections between personal pursuits and environmentally dangerous choices made by governments, are defenders of the surroundings. As such, they deserve safety.”
Forst’s feedback on the UK look like confirmed by a report, “Criminalisation and Repression of Local weather and Environmental Protests”, revealed by the College of Bristol in December 2024. As Catherine Early tells us in The Ecologist, the report finds that “British police arrest local weather and environmental protestors at practically thrice the worldwide common charge. The best proportion of protestors arrested was present in Australia, the place one in 5 had been apprehended by police. This was adopted by 17 % within the UK – a lot larger than the worldwide common of 6.3 %.”
Quoted in Damien Gayle’s article for The Guardian, Oscar Berglund, the researcher who led the research, says that “local weather protests [have increased] fairly sharply, and the response to this has been a crackdown that needs to be seen within the wider political sense of a breakdown in local weather motion.”
