Photo taken by Don Kimball outside the German Consulate in NYC in 2011 demanding Captain Watson’s release.
Captain Paul Watson, a co-founder of Greenpeace and the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS), has been in jail in Nuuk, Greenland for over a week, after federal police from Copenhagen, Denmark boarded his vessel, the John Paul Dejoria, while it attempted to dock and refuel enroute to the Northwest Passage. Its mission was to intercept the new long-range Japanese whaler Kanjei Maru. Sailing under the flag of St. Kitts, Watson, an American-Canadian Citizen, and his crew of 25 volunteers were swarmed by 14 Danish SWAT team officers as they took the captain away in handcuffs on an arrest warrant from the Japanese government.
Watson, an environmental and animal rights icon and star of the Animal Planet TV series “Whale Wars”, speaking on Monday, July 29 from his cellblock in Nuuk where he is being held without bail, said there are no problems in the cellblock that he shares with 9 other prisoners. Watson noted that eight, of them were Inuit, the indigenous peoples who are the majority of the population of Greenland, and have been inhabiting the island since 2000 BCE. When questioned why Japan would go to such lengths to have him arrested and detained he called the charges, “politically motivated”, and that, “he embarrassed Japan, and this is their revenge.”
For years, under Watson’s iron hand and steel will, the SSCS fleet of converted cargo ships and trawlers, equipped with a helicopter, harassed illegal Japanese whaleling operations in the Antarctic Ocean. Watson said the whalers harpooned as many as 6,500 whales for what the Japanese call “scientific experiments”. Watson has lawyers working his case from all over the world, including one from France where he lives (in a boat of course) on the Seine River with his wife and child. Watson lamented that he would have had a first class seat for the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics, if it hadn’t been for Danish cooperation is apprehending him on trumped-up charges of conspiracy to trespass on a Japanese whaler, or something akin to elevated-aggravated teasing. He also said that additional frivolous charges may be forthcoming from the scary samurai’s of the sea.
Watson believes that Japan wants to “shut him up”, and not just about their illegal whaling operations, but for his outspoken criticism about the continued failures by the Japanese government and the corporation TEPCO after the nuclear disaster there in 2011. Clean-up costs have already surpassed $200 billion according to the National Institute of Health’s, National Library of Medicine and National Center for Biotechnology Information. TEPCO is now intentionally dumping water used for cooling the reactors and laced with Tritium into the Pacific, some 13 after the meltdown of the three reactors at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant. Paul said, similar to fears Julian Assange had of being extradited from England to the US, for his courageous but sometimes controversial actions, that if he is taken to Japan, “he may never see home again.”
Numerous calls to the Danish consulate in Washington, DC, Chicago, Il, NYC and Los Angeles, CA inquiring as to when Denmark would release Captain Watson on bail, went unanswered. Watson, because of his non-compromising position against whale hunting, has been in this precarious position before. Held in Germany in 2011, on similar charges of little merit, he escaped German custody and spent six months in exile avoiding apprehension.
Watson has France’s President Emmanuel Macron, movie star Bridget Bardot and world renowned Ethologist Jane Goodall calling for his release. It was France’s Secret Service that sank Greenpeace’s anti-nuclear sailboat, the, Rainbow Warrior in Auckland, NZ in 1985 when they placed a bomb on board, killing one of the crew.
Watson was “forced out” of the SSCS in 2022, but still has ties with the French and Brazil chapters. Now operated by property mangers from Florida, Watson said the substantial donation to the SSCS from life-long animal activist, philanthrope and beloved TV personality, the late Bob Barker, is a big point of contention. He called what happened, “a hostile takeover”, of the SSCS. He now has his own foundation, the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, calling themselves, “Neptune’s Pirates”.
Paul said there will be a hearing by the High Court of Greenland on August 15th to determine if the case would proceed, and says that if it does he could still appeal the ruling in Denmark itself. He asks his supporters to put pressure on the Danish government to release him immediately as his actions to defend whales from being hunted down by Japanese whalers is wholly justified as it has been illegal to hunt whales since the International Whaling Commission ruling banned it in 1986.
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