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Japan woo-woos support for upcoming IWC vote on whaling ban

An undercover investigation by the Sunday Times reports today that Japan has been systematically attempting to corrupt the upcoming vote at the International Whaling Commission on June 21st, 2010 in Agadir, Morroco, by plying IWC delegates from at least six countries with prostitutes and cash in exchange for their votes in favour of lifting the current moratorium on whaling.

The “swing” delegates (no pun intended) belong to the governments of the Caribbean nations of St. Kitts and Nevis, and Grenada, as well as the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, the Republic of Guinea, and Ivory Coast.  They are all small countries which have minimal or non-existent whaling industries, unlike the three leading whaling states of Norway, Iceland and Japan.

According to the Times investigation, each of the IWC countries “entered negotiations to sell their votes in return for aid,” in which Japanese officials provided one minister (Guinea) with “a ‘minimum’ of $1,000 a day spending money in cash during IWC and other fisheries meetings.”

One of the sources quoted in the report, a senior fisheries official in Guinea, identified three separate Japanese agencies–fisheries, aid, and the Overeas Fisheries Co-operation Foundation–as being the conduits for the bribes to the Guinean minister responsible for the whaling portfolio.

“Good girls” and all-expenses paid trips

Fisheries officers from the Marshall Islands and Kirbati confirmed their receipt of the “support” from Japan without equivocation and that it came with strings attached.  The Marshall Islands official confirmed candidly that:

“We support Japan because of what they give us.”

In Tanzania, another recipient of the Japanese bribes, that country’s whaling commissioner told Times investigators that the Japanese provided complimentary prostitutes (“good girls”), hotel accommodation, and “all expenses-paid trips to Japan” to its IWC representatives.

Although Japan has officially denied the allegations, the Times investigative report says that it actually videotaped meetings at which the “agreements” took place, including admissions from the involved IWC delegates that “they voted with the whalers because of the large amounts of aid from Japan,”they receive cash payments in envelopes at IWC meetings from Japanese officials who pay their travel and hotel bills,” and “call girls were offered when fisheries ministers and civil servants visited Japan for meetings.”

The Times reporters were “under cover” pretending to represent a “billionaire conservationist”  and approached the IWC reps from these “pro-whaling” nations–some of which are landlocked and have no “industry” to speak of–and made overtures of “aid” in return for the delegates switching their votes in favour of Japan’s upcoming bid to end the 24-year moratorium.

The International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling was signed created in December 1946 in Washington, D.C. to “provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry” and led to the creation of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) three years later.

The IWC drafted regulatory guidelines for coastal and pelagic (deep sea) whaling and Japan became an IWC member in 1951.  It is fair to say that the IWC has been embroiled in and hampered by political conflicts ever since.  This arises in the main because of a major “loophole” in the ICRW which persist to this day and which Japan has exploited to its utmost to the chagrin of global anti-whaling groups and states.

Those pesky “notwithstanding clauses”

Article VIII of the IRWC provides that “notwithstanding anything contained in this Convention” any country that is signatoryy to the convention may grant to its own citizens “a special permit authorizing” them to “kill, take and treat whales for purposes of scientific research…and the killing, taking, and treating of whales” under such permits “shall be exempt from the operation of this Convention.”

The loophole further provides that “any whales taken under these special permits shall…be processed and the proceeds shall be dealt with in accordance with directions issued by the Government by which the permit was granted.

The Japanese government has consistently exploited Article VIII to maintain and expand its whaling industry under the guise of “scientific whaling”.  In essence, the quotas of allowable whale catches that Japan permits itself to take under Article VIII are held out as the by-product of “scientific research”.  In fact, the premise for Japan’s ostensible “scientific research” is to provide evidence to support the abolition of the 24-year moratorium on commercial whaling that was agreed to in 1986 and which expires this year.

An initial ten-year ban on whaling was agreed to by United Nations member states in 1972 but was not adopted by the IWC with Japan, Russia, Iceland, Norway, South Africa and Panama voting against.

The IWC’s membership increased over the next decade to 37 signatory states with a preponderance of anti-whaling (and for the most part, non-whaling) countries added to the ranks of the pro-moratorium side.  In 1982 the IWC members voted in favour of a 24-year ban on commercial whaling to take effect in 1986.

However Japan opposed the ban and, in accordance with other loophole provisions in the Convention, was able to exempt itself from the terms of the treaty and continue its commercial whaling.  But in 1972, under threat of U.S. trade sanctions if it did not comply, Japan acceded to eventually curtail its commercial defiance of the moratorium in 1988.

Despite its formal accession, Japan continued to exploit the Article VIII “scientific research” loophole in the IWRC and in 1986 issued its whalers a permit to kill 825 minke whales.  In a pattern that has pretty continued uninterrupted over the ensuing duration of the IWC moratorium, Japan’s claimed “research” premise for the permits was consistently challenged as bogus by the IWC’s scientific panel.  Nonetheless Japan carried on with its “scientific” whaling.

Japanese influence increases within IWC

In 1994 the IWC created a sanctuary in the Southern Ocean by an overwhelming majority vote.  Again, the Japanese voted against the anti-whaling initiative.  Environmental and anti-whaling groups such as the Sea Shepherd Foundation have been involved in “direct action” against what they claim are incursions by Japanese “scientific whaling” vessels into that sanctuary ever since.

At the same time the Japanese whaling industry has relentless lobbied to build up the pro-commercial whaling forces in the IWC.   A number of more recently added signatories to the IWRC, including small Caribbean countries, voted against the creation of an additional South Pacific whale sanctuary in 2000, along with several other “newbies” to the IWC who also received substantial economic aid from Japan.

As the IWC “ramped up” to the crucial 2010 expiry date of the moratorium, so too did Japans’ influence within the IWC gain further momentum.  In 2006, a non-binding IWC resolution was passed which endorsed the view that the soon-to-expire commercial whaling ban was no longer required. 

An aggressive campaign by Japan ensued in which the country sought to “normalize” the IWC by eliminating “extreme” positions favouring the absolute ban on future whaling.   Japan also pressed to make IWC change to a secret ballot voting system and campaigned for increased “cultural sensitivity” to the significance of commercial whaling to the Japanese people.

Japan’s posture of being “calm” and “rational” in the face of what it considers “terrorist” and “racist” anti-whaling movements is somewhat undermined by public comments such as those of an outspoken pro-commercial whaling advocate and senior fisheries boss Masayuki Komatsu in 2001 that minke whales were “the cockroaches of the ocean.”

In April of this year, the Japanese fisheries agency–one of the three official bodies (no pun intended) implicated in the Sunday Times sex-and-cash-for-IWC-votes scandal complained publicly that Japan had been able to realize only 5o per cent of its projected “scientific” whale quota for the 2009 season, pointing the harpoon of responsibility in the direction of anti-whaling activists such as the Sea Shepherd group.

The countries most opposed to Japan’s attempts to reverse the moratorium this month in Morocco are Australia, New Zealand the Britain.

The agenda for the IWC’s 62nd annual meeting in Morocco on June 21 will be dominated by the Japanese campaign to kill the whaling moratorium.  Although it is a fair guess that there will be snickering as a result of the Sunday Times revelations.

According to the draft IWC agenda: “Japan believes that the Commission should devote as much time as possible to “try to reduce conflicts and to try to build trust and consensus in part by minimising the number of decisions taken by voting at the plenary session” and tellingly, to ensure that “other members… contribute in a similar manner by refraining from making controversial Schedule amendment proposals that it believes are likely to damage the atmosphere of calm and solid dialogue which have been built through the ‘Future of the IWC’ process.”

Japan’s Morimoto: “stepped-up” measures to end…research whaling…do not bode well”

In a stern address in May 2010 to an IWC plenary, Japan’s whaling commissioner Minoru Morimoto directed his country’s “thar she blows” attitude towards Australia in no uncertain terms: “I am concerned that Australia’s continuous loud reiteration of its opposition to any form of commercial whaling and its “stepped-up” measures to end Japan’s research whaling, including threats of legal action, do not bode well.”

Simply put, Japan is hopeful that it can continue to twist arms (and apparently other parts of the anatomy) of IWC delegates to Morocco in the hopes of avoiding the kind of publicized and unfavourable media attention that its’ whaling activities invariably attract–to say nothing of the equally sensational antics of the anti-whaling groups in their high seas encounters with the Japanese fleet.

Until this alleged scandal erupted, a deal was in the offing that would have seen some acceptance in the IWRC of “legal” whale hunting.  According to the Sunday Times:

The deal would suspend the moratorium on commercial whaling for 10 years and allow Japan, Norway and Iceland to continue whaling within new quotas. Hunters will be permitted to kill whale species that are considered plentiful, including the sperm, sei, fin, Bryde’s and minke — described by a senior Japanese whaling official in 2001 as the “cockroach of the ocean”.

In the face of mounting accusations that it has attempted to buy pro-whaling votes through foreign aid and, well, there’s no polite way to put it, really–pimping for IWC delegates’ votes, the Japanese government has responded with a terse assertion that the allegations are “unsubstantiated propaganda.”

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This entry was posted on June 13, 2010 at 8:14 am and is filed under Current Events, Four Legs Dumb Two Legs Dumber, Our Dying Planet, The Bawdy Politick. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: conservation, International Whaling Commission, IWC, IWRC, Japanese whaling, Sea Shepherds, whaling moratorium

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