Posts Tagged ‘ASW’
Day Five of IWC 2016
Agenda Item 19 Finance and Administration The meeting opens slightly late due to technical difficulties. Bruno: regarding yesterday’s Agenda, I forgot to confirm that all delegates are happy for the Commission to endorse cooperation with other organisations? (General assent). Also apologizes to IGO/NGOs that he was ‘a little too fast’ in closing yesterday. The Chair…
Read MoreDenmark: Wanting their whale and eating it
So Denmark has submitted its opening statement to the IWC and I guess the question is, have they learned their lesson since the last meeting? One reading of the statement would suggest that Denmark wants to ‘have their cake’, and, as the old saying goes, quite literally, ‘eat it’. I asked in a previous post…
Read MoreWhale escapes harpoon attack only to be slaughtered years later
Alaskan Inupiat hunters made an unexpected discovery after killing the first bowhead whale of their hunt season. The 42 foot whale, who was brought onto the beach near Kaktovik, was found to have parts of an old explosive harpoon embedded in the tail area. The fragments are thought to have come from the type of…
Read MoreUnder the radar
It is shocking enough to hear that this year’s IWC meeting has given permission for Greenland to annually kill nearly 200 whales – including humpback and bowhead whales – for the next four years but there is another gruesome activity that doesn’t apparently require any international discussion, agreement or quota – the brutal killing of…
Read MoreGreenland and the IWC – what comes next?
The issue of whaling in Greenland is, of course, an emotive one. For those that do not wish to see any whales killed, they find it hard to understand why anyone would or could kill a whale in any circumstance. For the indigenous hunter in Greenland whose parents and grandparents have hunted whales for millennia,…
Read MoreWhilst the EU sacrifices political capital for Greenlandic whaling, what are Greenland and the Faroese doing?
So the EU Commission is extending itself to support Greenland’s demands for overturning the IWC’s accepted criteria for aboriginal subsistence whaling (ASW), but what is Greenland and the Faroe Islands, Denmark’s two North Atlantic overseas territories doing to help the EU Commission? Well, nothing it would seem. The Arctic Journal reports that whilst ‘foreign policy in…
Read MoreWDC exposes heavy promotion of whale meat to tourists in Greenland
Investigations in Greenland by Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) have revealed whale meat meant for local Greenlandic people is openly on sale to tourists. The discovery comes as the 65th meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) – the body that regulates whaling – begins in Portoroz, Slovenia. This is a damning revelation coming, as it…
Read MoreGreenland and the evolving concept of ‘Local Community’ in relation to its demands for increased large whale quotas
Since the IWC meeting, I have been asked by some observers why do I think that the Greenlandic and Danish delegations actively threw away their chances of getting a quota this year? These same officials knew that the European Uion (EU), after the revelations of tourists eating bowhead whale meat and an internal EU coordination…
Read MoreUS and Russia act as cover for St. Vincent ASW proposal
The last subject to be introduced in yesterday’s meeting was the ASW quota proposal for the US, Russian Federation and St Vincent and the Grenadines. The proposal was presented by the USA. There have been discussions around the meeting about the fact that these three quotas were presented together: nobody doubts that Alaskan and Russian…
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