Greenpeace blasts whaling body over Iceland entry
Date: 17-Oct-02
Country: UK
Author: Gideon Long
The British-based commission voted this week to allow Iceland back in as a full member for the first time in 10 years.
Iceland joins Norway as one of only two countries in the world which have negotiated the right to hunt whales for commercial purposes while still being IWC members.
"The commission's decision is thoroughly disappointing and defies all common sense," Greenpeace oceans campaigner Richard Page told Reuters.
"Iceland's stance, in joining the commission while having a reservation about the moratorium on commercial whaling, is an act of bad faith," he added, saying the lives of minke and fin whales in the North Atlantic were in danger.
The vote was extremely tight. Of the IWC's 50 members, 19 voted in favour and 18 against. The other member countries were either absent or ineligible to vote.
Several key players, including Britain and the United States, opposed the decision.
Norway, which has long-standing objections to the worldwide moratorium on whale hunting, and Japan, which hunts whales for scientific purposes, backed Iceland.
Iceland left the IWC in 1992 in anger over the worldwide moratorium on commercial whale hunting, agreed in 1986 and implemented by the vast majority of IWC members.
Later, it tried to renegotiate its way back in but was rebuffed several times in the 1990s. Each time, Iceland made further concessions in an attempt to be reaccepted.
This time, its bid succeeded after it agreed it would not resume commercial whaling until 2006 at the earliest, and only then under strict regulations.
"Under no circumstances will whaling for commercial purposes be authorised in Iceland without a sound scientific basis and an effective management and enforcement scheme," the Icelandic delegation said in its statement of adherence to the IWC.
But Greenpeace said all commercial whaling was wrong, regardless of how it is regulated, and warned Iceland it would endanger its own tourist industry if it started whaling again.
"Since the early 1990s they've had this truly sustainable industry grow up, namely whale-watching," Page said. "It seems to me extraordinary that they would want to jeopardise that by starting whaling again."
In a separate move, the IWC also voted this week to allow indigenous people in Alaska to kill a limited number of bowhead whales as part of so-called subsistence hunting.
They will be allowed to hunt 280 bowhead whales - at a maximum of 67 per calendar year - in the period between 2003 and 2006. The whales will be hunted in the Bering Strait, between Russia and the United States.
