Paul Watson arrested in Greenland
On Sunday morning, July 21, Captain Paul Watson, co-founder of the marine conservation organization Greenpeace, founder of Sea Shepherd and the Captain Paul Watson Foundation (CPWF), was arrested upon his arrival in Nuuk, Greenland.
Paul Watson has been arrested several times in the past due to his activities related to the protection of the marine environment.
As an environmentalist, he has often taken controversial measures to draw attention to the exploitation of the oceans. His arrests have attracted international attention and sparked discussions about the role of activists in environmental protection.
Captain Watson made a stopover in Greenland aboard his 72-meter flagship M/Y JOHN PAUL DEJORIA with 25 volunteer crew members to refuel. He was on his way to the Northwest Passage as part of the CPWF Operation Kangei Maru, a mission to intercept the newly built Japanese whaling vessel Kangei Maru in the North Pacific.
“We were here and arrested Paul based on an international arrest warrant from Japan,” stated the head of the Danish federal police at the scene of the arrest. No further information was given to the crew.
It is suspected that the arrest is related to a previous “Red Notice” issued in connection with Captain Watson’s earlier anti-whaling operations in Antarctica. Japan’s Antarctic scientific whaling program JARPA was declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2014.
“We are completely shocked, because the Red Notice had disappeared a few months ago. We were surprised, as this could mean it had been deleted or made confidential. We now understand that Japan made it confidential in order to lure Paul into a false sense of security. We urgently urge the Danish government to release Captain Watson and not to comply with this politically motivated request,” stated Locky MacLean, head of ship operations at CPWF.
After Japan had violated the ruling of the International Court of Justice for several years, it finally ceased whaling in the Antarctic in 2016 and now hunts whales only in its territorial waters. The CPWF believes that Japan plans to resume high-seas whaling in the Southern Ocean and the North Pacific as early as 2025, and that the reactivation of the Red Notice against Captain Watson is politically motivated and coincides with the launch of a newly built whale processing vessel.
In Nuuk, more than a dozen Danish police officers and SWAT teams boarded the M/Y John Paul DeJoria as soon as it reached port. After Captain Watson was led off the ship in handcuffs, he was taken to the local police station. The crew and the foundation have no way of contacting him and have received no further news. At the time of writing, Watson remains in custody, and it is not known whether Denmark will allow his extradition to Japan.
