Ready to go (Image: Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty Images)

A bar on Japan’s scientific whaling in the Antarctic could turn out to be short-lived. On the eve of a major meeting on whaling next week, Japan has asked for four of its coastal communities to be allowed to resume killing minke whales. It is also drawing up a new “scientific” whaling programme in the Antarctic that it hopes will fall within international law.

In March, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the Netherlands, ruled that Japan’s “JARPA II” scientific whaling programme in Antarctic waters between 2005 and 2014 was illegal. Conservationists hoped it would be the end of a research programme that they believe was simply a front for commercial whaling, which has been banned since 1986.

The ruling will be hotly debated next week at the biennial meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which regulates whaling, in Portoroz, Slovenia. The IWC had long allowed JARPA II to proceed, but the court overruled that when it declared the programme was “not for ‘purposes of scientific research'”. The IWC’s criteria for judging research proposals are now under scrutiny.


“The credibility of the whole organisation is at stake,” says whale biologist Vassili Papastavrou of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. “It goes to the heart of what is and what isn’t genuine science,” he adds. “Is the IWC up to the task of making sure future permits for research are legal according to the international court’s judgment?”

Ban? What ban?

Meanwhile, Japan is exploring ways to sidestep the ban. In June it caught minke whales off its north-east coast, supposedly for research purposes, because those waters are not covered by the Antarctic ruling.

Next week, Japan will ask the IWC to allow four coastal communities to catch 17 minke whales between them for local consumption. They argue that the whaling moratorium has harmed those communities. “The impact in these communities was, and remains, enormous,” says the proposal.

Japanese scientists are also drafting a new scientific research programme, dubbed JARPA III, that they hope will comply with the March ruling. If they succeed, “scientific” whaling could resume in the Antarctic by the end of 2015.

However, a resolution proposed by New Zealand could sabotage that plan by strengthening the duty on the IWC to uphold the March ruling. Currently the IWC’s scientific committee can grant permits for research on its own, but the New Zealand resolution would require the entire IWC to give permission.