PARIS, France (AFP) — Animal rights activist Paul Watson, freed this week from detention in Denmark, vowed on Saturday to end whale hunting worldwide and to stop Japan if it tried to resume whaling in the Southern Ocean.
Watson, a 74-year-old Canadian-American, returned to France on Friday after spending five months in detention in the Danish autonomous territory of Greenland due to an extradition demand from Japan.
“One way or the other we are going to end whaling worldwide,” Watson told reporters in central Paris where several hundred supporters had gathered to greet him.
“We need to learn to live on this planet in harmony with all those other species that share this world with us.”
“If Japan intends to return to the Southern Ocean we will be there,” said the founder of the conservation group Sea Shepherd and the Captain Paul Watson Foundation.
“We are not protesting Japanese whaling. We are simply requesting they obey the law.”
Under international pressure, Japan, one of three countries to conduct commercial whaling along with Iceland and Norway, abandoned these hunts. Since 2019 it has only caught whales in its own waters.
But in May, Japan launched the Kangei Maru, a whaling mother ship.
Activists believe this means Japan intends to resume whaling in the Southern Ocean, although the company operating the vessel has denied this.