{"id":186221,"date":"2014-03-31T18:20:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-31T23:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/03\/31\/shave-the-whales\/"},"modified":"2014-03-31T18:20:00","modified_gmt":"2014-03-31T23:20:00","slug":"shave-the-whales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/03\/31\/shave-the-whales\/","title":{"rendered":"Shave the Whales"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>\"\"<\/div>\n

The International Court of Justice in The Hague has just made formal the blatantly obvious and ruled that Japan’s so-called “research” whaling has nothing to do with research, and so is illegal<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The decision to ban Japan\u2019s annual whaling drive off Antarctica, handed down by the United Nations\u2019 highest court on Monday, was a hard-won victory for conservationists who long argued that Tokyo\u2019s whaling research was a cover for commercial whaling.<\/span>

<\/span>The ruling by the International Court of Justice in The Hague halts a Japanese program that has captured more than 10,000 minke and other whales in the Southern Ocean each year since 1988 in the name of biological research.<\/span>

<\/span>Japan may not be ready to lay down its harpoons entirely. Though the ruling is final, it allows the Japanese to continue to hunt whales under a redesigned program, said Nanami Kurasawa, who heads a marine conservation group in Tokyo.<\/span>

<\/span>And the court\u2019s decision does not affect smaller hunts that Japan carries out in the northern Pacific, or coastal whaling carried out on a smaller scale by local fishermen.<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cIt\u2019s an important decision, but it also leaves the Japanese government a lot of leeway,\u201d Ms. Kurasawa said. \u201cThe Japanese government could start research whaling again but under a different name, and it would be out of the ruling\u2019s purview.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>In a 12-to-4 judgment, the court found that Japan was in breach of its international obligations by catching and killing minke whales and issuing permits for hunting humpback and fin whales within the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, established by the International Whaling Commission.<\/span>

<\/span>Reading a summary of the judgment, the presiding judge, Peter Tomka of Slovakia, said that the latest Japanese program, which was expanded in 2005, had involved the killing of thousands of minke whales and a number of fin whales, but that its \u201cscientific output to date appears limited.\u201d The ruling suggested that Japan\u2019s whaling hunt was based on politics and logistics, rather than science.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The driving force behind Japanese whaling is stupid, brutal, and mindlessly destructive nationalism, something which the residents of Nanking may recall<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And they will continue to butcher porpoises in local waters<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But it is a start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The International Court of Justice in The Hague has just made formal the blatantly obvious and ruled that Japan’s so-called “research” whaling has nothing to do with research, and so is illegal: The decision to ban Japan\u2019s annual whaling drive off Antarctica, handed down by the United Nations\u2019 highest court on Monday, was a hard-won …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1079,1188,1250,985],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-japan","category-oceans","category-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186221"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}