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extradition
What US Militarism Has to Do With Japan's Quest to Slaughter More Whales
Whaling, it turns out, has very little to do with whaling and much more to with how powerful nations want to dominate the world's oceans.
Aug 26, 2024
In early August, the crew on Japan’s new whaling factory ship dismembered a male fin whale, the first commercial catch of the species in several decades. A few days earlier, Paul Watson was arrested in Nuuk, Greenland. He sits in a Danish prison, waiting a decision on his extradition to Japan. Given the Japanese courts’ record of 99.9% conviction rate for criminal cases, and issues with Japanese justice system, if extradited, he will probably spend the rest of his life imprisoned.
A few months ago, a paper led by Norwegian government scientists showed that there are around 50,000 fin whales in just one small part of the Southern Ocean. Also in Antarctic waters, the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research has been running a research program which, as the the Institute states, is the “aimed at the sustainable use of whale resources in the Antarctic Ocean.” A new era of commercial whaling in the Antarctic looms.
Forty years ago, the International Whaling Commission introduced the whaling moratorium—a pause in slaughter, to allow whale populations to recover. At the time, the belief by most in the whale conservation community was that by the time that whale populations finally recovered, those still engaged in whaling would have given up, making the moratorium permanent. That’s not what’s happened. Three nations—Japan, Norway, and Iceland—still engage in commercial whaling.
There are many arguments against whaling: it’s cruel, it has to be subsidized, most people in whaling nations don’t care about it, it’s traditional in very few places in Japan, whales don’t eat all the fish, instead they’re ecosystem engineers that contribute to carbon sequestration. These points have been made for many years, and have never had the slightest impact on the Japanese whaling bureaucracy. They’re not only irrelevant, they’ve proven pointless.
Whaling, it turns out, isn’t about whales at all. Japan’s primary interest in commercial whaling is to maintain their geopolitical clout to exploit other marine wildlife (“living marine resources”) internationally. Tuna, for example. This point’s been made recently in a couple of forums. For the Japanese government, whaling’s a thin-edge-of-the-wedge problem. The moratorium was a big win for marine conservation that couldn’t be repeated with other international fisheries.
Given this framing, the actions of the Japanese whaling industry over the past forty years are rational. Whaling is primarily about asserting dominance in international negotiations over access to marine wildlife, so whether or not Japanese people eat much whale meat is irrelevant. What matters is access to other fisheries by Japan’s pelagic fishing fleets. Subsidizing whaling is a minuscule price to pay. The primary role of Japan’s new floating factory, the Kangei Maru, is as a flagship, a symbol of Japanese hegemony in international maritime negotiations. So its $48 million price tag is trivial. A Ford class US aircraft carrier, with a build cost of around $13 billion and an annual upkeep of $700 million, puts that in perspective. The Kangei Maru’s costs are a rounding error.
Despite Japan leaving the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in late 2018, the Japanese fisheries bureaucracy still controls the activities of the pro-whaling bloc. This September, the IWC meets again. One rumor currently swirling is that the Japanese will rejoin the IWC with a reservation to commercial whaling, one way to demolish the whaling moratorium. Another appeared a couple of weeks ago, when the prestigious scientific journal Nature published an opinion piece calling for the IWC to be dismantled. The article’s first author is a former chair of the IWC, who with his coauthors, argue that the IWC is now a “zombie” organization that has outlived its usefulness and should be dismantled.
Interesting timing.
Once, the threat of US sanctions in response to “diminishing the effectiveness” of the IWC regulated the manner in which the whaling bloc engaged there. That threat—obviously—no longer exists. How have the whalers brought the U.S. to heel on whaling? What’s their lever?
There was a belief in the NGO community that the threat of withholding IWC quotas on U.S. Inuit bowhead whaling was driving U.S. acquiescence. The pro-whaling bloc engaged in brinkmanship on this several times in the past. But the “Aboriginal Subsistence” whaling issues at the IWC have been resolved, removing this threat. Besides, ending the IWC would put bowhead whaling management back entirely with the U.S., internally. It can’t be that.
It’s here the military comes in. The U.S. has around 55,000 military personnel based in Japan. This is, for example, almost the size of the Australia’s active duty defense forces. Their weaponry includes some the most advanced in the U.S. arsenal. Most of those personnel are based in Okinawa, where there were over 6,000 criminal cases involving U.S. military personnel in the 50 years since the island was handed back to Japan in 1972. That’s a couple of crimes a week. And they include reported 134 rapes, or two to three reported rapes per year, including recent charges of the sexual assault of a child. Understandably, there is a vocal anti-US-base movement in Okinawa that regularly engages in mass protest.
These put Paul Watson’s “accomplice to assault” and “ship trespass” charges in context.
At the same time, the U.S. is reconstituting its forces in Japan, a buildup in response to the perceived threat to U.S. hegemony now posed by China. The Japanese government has leverage. Getting its way on whaling is Japan’s price for U.S. bases.
What could happen? Possibilities include Japan rejoining the IWC with a reservation that allows it to conduct commercial whaling wherever it wants. Perhaps the IWC will collapse. The recent Nature article shows that destroying the IWC is being considered. Returning the management of whaling to whaling nations? We know how that worked. And allowing Japan’s return to the IWC with a reservation will return the IWC’s role to that of a toothless body overseeing mass slaughter.
The huge U.S. military presence in Japan matters to the national security apparatus of the United States. The bureaucracy has worked with the Japanese government to see commercial whaling return. The return of commercial whaling is the U.S. military's quid pro quo for its regional dominance in the Pacific—not to mention its rapists in Okinawa.
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Supporters Rally Behind Assange as UK Court Hears 'Pathetic' US Case
"Let me be very clear: This case is about journalism," said a campaigner with Reporters Without Borders. "It is about press freedom. If they make an exception of Julian Assange, the rule will be broken."
Feb 21, 2024
Supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange marched the streets of central London on Wednesday demanding his immediate release after U.S. government lawyers argued to the British High Court that the journalist should be extradited across the Atlantic to face espionage charges.
"How pathetic the U.S. case is," Stella Assange, the WikiLeaks founder's wife, told a crowd gathered outside Wednesday's court hearing, which represents the final legal avenue in the United Kingdom to prevent his extradition to the U.S.
"What they're trying argue is that state secrets trump revealing state crimes," Stella Assange said of U.S. lawyers. "This is the balance they're trying to shift. They want impunity, they don't want to be scrutinized, and journalism stands in the way."
BREAKING: @Stella_Assange explains the arguments laid out by the prosecution#FreeAssangeNOW pic.twitter.com/60M286NkMb
— Free Assange - #FreeAssange (@FreeAssangeNews) February 21, 2024
A decision in the case—which will decide whether Julian Assange can appeal his extradition—could be weeks, or even months, away.
If the British High Court rules that Assange can't appeal, his legal team is expected to ask the European Court of Human Rights to halt his extradition to the U.S., where Assange faces 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and a possible 175-year prison sentence.
United Nations experts, international human rights groups, and even one British judge have argued that extradition to the U.S. would put the 52-year-old publisher's life at grave risk. Assange was unable to attend this week's hearings or even follow them virtually due to his poor health, his lawyers said.
But global calls from
press freedom groups, the government of Assange's home country, and others for the U.S. Justice Department to drop the case and let the publisher go free have not moved the Biden administration, which decided to continue pursuing Assange's extradition after inheriting the case from the Trump administration—whose CIA reportedly considered kidnapping or assassinating the WikiLeaks founder.
During Wednesday's hearing, the U.S. government's lawyers
argued that Assange's decision to seek out and publish classified U.S. documents—some of which exposed American war crimes—went "far beyond" what could be characterized as journalistic conduct, an argument that many journalists have rejected.
"It is impossible to overstate the dangerous precedent Mr. Assange's indictment under the Espionage Act and possible extradition sets: Every national security journalist who reports on classified information now faces possible Espionage Act charges," Laura Poitras, a journalist and documentary filmmaker, wrote in a New York Timesop-ed in 2020. "It paves the way for the United States government to indict other international journalists and publishers. And it normalizes other countries' prosecution of journalists from the United States as spies."
Assange's lawyer, Edward Fitzgerald, similarly argued during the first day of the closely watched hearings on Tuesday that Assange is "being prosecuted for engaging in [the] ordinary journalistic practice of obtaining and publishing classified information, information that is both true and of obvious and important public interest."
Thousands marched through the streets to the office of the UK Prime Minister in Downing Street following the conclusion of Julian Assange's court hearing today, calling for his immediate release | via @MintPressNews #FreeAssange #FreeAssangeNOW pic.twitter.com/YIpjdoT65j
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) February 21, 2024
Rebecca Vincent, director of campaigns at Reporters Without Borders, said following Wednesday's hearing that "in these past two days, we have heard nothing new from the U.S. government."
"We have heard them double down on the same arguments that they've been making for 13 years," said Vincent. "Let me be very clear: This case is about journalism. It is about press freedom. If they make an exception of Julian Assange, the rule will be broken—and no one, no journalist, no publisher, no journalistic source, no media organization can ever be confident that their rights will be respected again."
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Days Before Extradition Hearing, Australian Parliament Tells US to Drop Assange Case
The vote "gives the government a real mandate to advocate very, very strongly for a political solution to bring Julian Assange home," said the journalist's brother.
Feb 15, 2024
As WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange awaits a two-day hearing before the United Kingdom's High Court next week on his possible extradition to the United States, lawmakers in his home country of Australia voted Wednesday in favor of pushing the U.S. and U.K. to allow Assange to return home instead.
"Enough is enough," said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese regarding the U.S. case against Assange, who published thousands of classified diplomatic and military documents in 2010 that included evidence of U.S. war crimes. "This thing cannot just go on and on and on indefinitely."
The prime minister joined 85 other lawmakers in voting for a motion proposed by Andrew Wilkie, an Independent member of the country's House of Representatives, to demand that the U.S. and U.K. drop the extradition effort and bring the case against Assange "to a close so that Mr. Assange can return home to his family in Australia."
Forty-two lawmakers opposed the measure.
Assange has been held at London's high-security Belmarsh Prison for the past five years, having been arrested for skipping bail in a separate legal matter.
In the U.S., he faces 17 espionage charges over WikiLeaks' publication of the classified documents.
In 2021, a U.K. judge ruled that the U.S. could not extradite Assange on the charges, saying prison conditions in the U.S. would endanger Assange's life. The journalist's physical and mental health has been in decline since his imprisonment, and he has suffered a mini-stroke, severe depression, and suicidal ideation, according to his attorneys.
The Biden administration appealed the decision, and the following year a court ruled that the extradition could proceed.
The High Court is set to hear Assange's case on February 20-21 to determine whether he should be granted a full appeal to challenge his extradition, and his family and other supporters fear that if he loses the appeal, the U.K. could send him to the U.S. before he has a chance to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.
Assange's wife, Stella Assange, said at a news conference on Thursday that the journalist could be on a plane to the U.S. "within days" if he loses the case.
"If he is extradited, he will die," she said.
On Wednesday, Amnesty International reiterated its call for the charges against Assange to be dropped, citing both "the risk of serious human rights violations" against him if he is held in the U.S. prison system and "a profound 'chilling effect' on global media freedom."
"The risk to publishers and investigative journalists around the world hangs in the balance. Should Julian Assange be sent to the U.S. and prosecuted there, global media freedoms will be on trial, too," said Julia Hall, Amnesty International's expert on counter-terrorism and criminal justice in Europe. "The public's right to information about what their governments are doing in their name will be profoundly undermined. The U.S. must drop the charges under the Espionage Act against Assange and bring an end to his arbitrary detention in the U.K."
Albanese said it is generally "not up to Australia to interfere in the legal processes of other countries, but it is appropriate for us to put our very strong view that those countries need to take into account the need for this to be concluded."
Speaking before Parliament ahead of the vote, Wilkie urged his colleagues to "stand for media freedom and the rights of journalists to do their jobs."
"Regardless of what you might think of Julian Assange," he said, "this has gone on too long... It must be brought to an end. And I'm confident that this Parliament can support this motion... It will send a very powerful political signal to the British government and the U.S. government."
Gabriel Shipton, Assange's brother, applauded Parliament for their show of support "at a crucial time" and said the vote "gives the government a real mandate to advocate very, very strongly for a political solution to bring Julian Assange home."
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