Shorouk Express
According to the Danes, Santa Claus lives in Greenland, and his mailbox can be found in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk. In the run up to Christmas 2024, there was one high-profile resident of Nuuk, with a long, snow-white beard and flowing hair, who could easily have been mistaken for Father Christmas, except for the fact that he was locked inside the city’s prison.
Thankfully, Paul Watson was released just in time to spend Christmas with his family in France. The Toronto-born environmentalist and anti-whaling activist had been held in Nuuk prison since July 2024, to await judgement by Danish authorities on whether he would be extradited to Japan. An Interpol red notice issued on behalf of Japan accuses Watson of “Breaking into [a] Vessel, Damage to Property, Forcible Obstruction of Business, Injury” (all of which Watson denies).
The vessel in question, Shonan Maru 2, belonged to Japan’s whaling fleet. Watson and others have long accused Japan of illegally bypassing the International Whaling Commision’s ban on commercial whaling by claiming that its operations are for the purposes of scientific research. In 2014, the International Court of Justice in The Hague agreed with Australia and New Zealand that Japan’s whaling activities were illegal.
In The Conversation, Gilles Paché, a professor of supply chains in Aix-Marseille University in France, provides the cultural, historical and economic context for Japanese whaling operations, and concludes that “Watson’s approach highlights the broader societal debate over the global responsibility to protect biodiversity and the limits of cultural relativism.”
“In Japan, Watson’s actions are often seen as a provocative assault on a cultural tradition, a perspective highlighted by some European media outlets”, Paché explains. “However, this narrative overlooks the powerful industrial machinery behind Japanese whaling. While tradition plays a role, Japan’s whaling operations are also driven by a government-supported industrial complex”.
As Paché argues, appeals to Japanese “cultural authenticity” collapse when you look at the dwindling market for whale meat (2,000 tons consumed annually, compared to 230,000 tons in the 1960s), or compare the “small-scale, limited-impact techniques of the past” to “the industrialised operations Watson critiques today. In 2023 alone, Japan’s whaling fleet killed nearly 300 whales, with authorities setting a 2024 target of 200.”
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Interviewed by Hortense Chauvin for Reporterre back in September 2024, Watson also highlighted the shrinking appetite for whale meat (“fewer than two percent of Japanese people eat whale meat”), while also accusing a coterie of “ultranationalists” and yakuza members of perpetuating the industry for their own personal gain.
In a video released by Vakita on 18 December, after the Danish Ministry of Justice decided against Japan’s case for extradition, Watson gives special thanks to the people of France, Emmanuel Macron and Hugo Clément. The latter is a French journalist and environmentalist who established Vakita in 2022 as an outlet for both “investigation and action”. The outlet has mobilised the public and campaigned for Watson’s release since his arrest in July, and has produced exclusive video content on the case.
Writing in Libération in late October, Thomas Legrand argued that France should renew its old tradition of granting citizenship to freedom fighters, especially environmental activists like Watson, who should be placed “under the same heroic banner” as those who fought against twentieth-century totalitarianism.
Given Watson’s gratitude to France, it is somewhat ironic that, according to Michel Forst, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders, France is “the worst country in Europe” when it comes to police repression of environmentalists.
“The violence of of the police forces is exceptional”, Forst told Emmanuel Clévenot for Reporterre. “Their counterparts abroad cannot comprehend the manner in which the French respond to protests, nor can they comprehend how they could use such violence. […] Here, tear gas and blast balls are used indiscriminately. ‘kettling’, even though forbidden, is still used. These are all abuses not seen in other countries.” While France may be the worst in terms of police repression, Forst claims that the UK is the worst when it comes to judicial repression, pointing to the (roughly) three-year prison sentences handed down to Just Stop Oil activists.
Forst also brings special attention to the role of journalists: “It’s a bad sign when journalists have to make a habit of wearing head to toe protection when covering protests. Journalists, whose remarkable work brings to light the connections between private interests and environmentally harmful decisions made by governments, are defenders of the environment. As such, they deserve protection.”
Forst’s comments on the UK appear to be confirmed by a report, “Criminalisation and Repression of Climate and Environmental Protests”, published by the University of Bristol in December 2024. As Catherine Early tells us in The Ecologist, the report finds that “British police arrest climate and environmental protestors at nearly three times the global average rate. The highest proportion of protestors arrested was found in Australia, where one in five were apprehended by police. This was followed by 17 percent in the UK – much higher than the international average of 6.3 percent.”
Quoted in Damien Gayle’s article for The Guardian, Oscar Berglund, the researcher who led the study, says that “climate protests [have increased] quite sharply, and the response to this has been a crackdown that has to be seen in the wider political sense of a breakdown in climate action.”
