Veteran anti-whaling activist arrested in Greenland

Anti-whaling activist Paul Watson has been arrested in Greenland under an international warrant issued by Japan, authorities and his foundation said.

Mr Watson, star of the reality TV show Whale Wars, was arrested when his ship docked in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, a police statement said.

The arrest is believed to be related to an Interpol Red Notice issued for Mr Watson’s previous anti-whaling interventions in the Antarctic region, the Captain Paul Watson Foundation said.

The 73-year-old will be brought before a district court with a request to detain him pending a decision on his potential extradition to Japan, police said.

Footage posted by his foundation on X showed officers handcuffing Mr Watson on the John Paul DeJoria ship, putting him inside a police van and driving him away.

His foundation said it was “completely shocked, as the Red Notice had disappeared a few months ago”.

“We were surprised because it could mean that it had been erased or made confidential. We understand now that Japan made it confidential to lure Paul into a false sense of security,” Locky MacLean, ship operation’s director for the foundation, said in a statement.

“We implore the Danish government to release Captain Watson and not entertain this politically-motivated request.”

Greenland is an autonomous Danish dependent territory with self-government and its own parliament.

A Red Notice was issued against Mr Watson in 2012, with Interpol stating he was wanted by Japan on charges of causing damage and injury in two incidents in the Antarctic Ocean in 2010 against a Japanese whaling ship.

Japan’s government has made no comment but a spokeswoman for the Japanese coastguard told the AFP news agency it was aware of the arrest.

Mr Watson’s foundation said he was on his way to “intercepting Japan’s newly-built factory ship, the Kangei Maru, in the North Pacific”.

The ship, which set off from Japan in May, butchers whales caught and killed by smaller vessels.

Activists targeted the Kangei Maru’s predecessor before 2019, when Japan hunted whales in the Antarctic and North Pacific for what it said were “scientific” purposes.

Japan left the International Whaling Commission in 2019 and now only conducts commercial whaling in its own waters, and on what it calls a sustainable scale.

However, Mr Watson’s foundation believes Japan is planning to resume high-seas whaling in the Southern Ocean and North Pacific as early as next year.

In a statement, the group said the “reactivation” of the Red Notice against Mr Watson “is politically motivated and coincides with the launch of a newly-built factory whale processing vessel”.

Mr Watson has gained supporters from across the world due to his decades of activism, but has also received criticism and faced legal issues due to his aggressive tactics.

Some of that criticism has come from Greenpeace, which Mr Watson claims he was a co-founder of despite the group denying this.