MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Animal rights organizations claim Japan is corrupting the Whaling Commission

Andreas Morlok from ProWal says Japan “hands out monies” to Pacific, African and Caribbean countries

Animal rights organizations claim Japan has been handing out generous grants to African, Caribbean and Pacific countries to support turning the International Whaling Commission into a “toothless paper tiger” undermining the whaling-moratorium.

Furthermore they consider that the IWC is run by “30 corrupt countries” and nobody does anything about it.

ProWal (Radolfzell) and Whale-and-Dolphin-Protection-Forum (WDSF/Hagen/Westf.) representatives were present at the recent IWC meeting held in the island of Jersey, which convened delegates from 89 countries.

At the conference in Jersey the agenda included a query by Great Britain into presumed corruption of some member states and how to stop them, said the animal-rights organizations.

During the past years it was assumed that Japan was granting countries, mostly third world countries from Africa and the Pacific, “monies for development” so that these countries could join the commission and vote as such for the interests of Japan.

Japan is also said to have paid the annual dues for their IWC-membership as well as transport and hotel costs for the members of such countries. On top of this there were daily bonuses paid to each of the delegates as pocket money in the amount of one thousand dollars.

“Japan’s purpose to convert the IWC as a toothless paper tiger, which cannot make any decisions and to undermine the whaling-moratorium for the protection of the whales is getting to almost become reality”, claim ProWal (Radolfzell) and Whale-and-Dolphin-Protection-Forum (WDSF/Hagen/Westf).

Jürgen Ortmüller, Head of WDSF alleges Norway, Japan, Iceland and Denmark together with its satellites Greenland and the Faroe Islands have been kicking the whale protection effort for decades and are only interested in financial gain.

“This has to be stopped, otherwise the IWC, which is a whaling-organization and not a true whale-protection organization, might as well be dissolved. Japan is killing each year more than 1000 whales under the cover of scientific research although nowadays there are sacrificing the whales. The whale meat is then sold in Japanese restaurants and supermarket as a delicacy” said Jürgen Ortmüller.

“Japan has accumulated a cache of about 6.000 tons of whale meat for which there is no more demand and the Faroe Islands are killing every year more than 1000 pilot whales and are doing commercial business with the meat as we can prove” he added.

The two whale-protection organizations also claim Denmark through Greenland has renewed requests to IWC for hump-back whale hunting licences, an action that can only be described as “a cover-up operation for advantageously promoting national interests”.

Andreas Morlok, ProWal CEO who simulated a ‘distribution of monies” among country representatives during the recent IWC conference in Jersey said that “corruption has to be shown off with a symbolic offering in order to publicize this scandal; it is outrageous that a commission, which has international legal rights, is run by 30 corrupt countries and nobody does anything about it. We demand IWC members to throw out these corrupt countries from the IWC so that true measures of protection for the whales can be implemented”.

However he also admitted that it was gratifying that “the subject corruption was also taken up at the IWC conference and more transparency was agreed”.

Before the IWC Jersey conference ProWal and WDSF called on the UN for the creation of a true international whale-protection commission, which would be responsible for the multi-field protection measures of and for the welfare of all dolphins and whales.

“Sadly, though, the answer was that the UN is financially not able to support such an undertaking” pointed out Morlok.