Sea Shepherd whaling footage fuels call for Australian intervention

Anti-Whaling group Sea Shepherd has accused the Australian government of reneging on a promise to monitor Japanese whaling, after capturing graphic images of the latest slaughter in the Southern Ocean. Former Greens leader and Sea Shepherd Australia chairman Bob Brown said the Abbott government had failed to deliver on its promise to send an aircraft to the Southern Ocean to monitor the annual whaling season.

Dr Brown went further, using the graphic footage of the carcass and blood-strewn deck of the Japanese vessel Nisshin Maru to urge Australia and New Zealand to send naval vessels to uphold the region's international whale sanctuary. "This bloody operation would simply not be occurring if we had prime ministers in Canberra and Wellington with the spine to stand up to this illegal operation," he said in Hobart.

"There should be naval vessels down there to defend Australia's sovereignty and its whales in our backyard. A Customs vessel was promised, with surveillance. That hasn't happened. As a minimum (they should) keep that election promise."

From The Australian - Sea Shepherd Operation Relentless

Japan halts whale hunt after chase by Sea Shepherd

Japan has suspended its annual Antarctic whale hunt following protests from a campaign group. Activists from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society have been chasing the Japanese fleet's mother ship. An official at the country's fisheries agency said whaling had been halted "for now" because of safety concerns.

Commercial whaling was banned in 1986 but Japan uses a regulation permitting hunting for scientific research. Iceland and Norway have lodged official objections to the ban and continue to hunt commercially. BBC News

Sea Shepherd - Japanese Whalers Escorted out of the Whaling Grounds

WikiLeaks: Secret whaling deal plotted by US and Japan

Japan and the US proposed to investigate and act against international anti-whaling activists from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as part of a political deal to reduce whaling in Antarctic waters.

Four confidential cables from the US embassy in Tokyo and the state department in Washington, released by WikiLeaks, show US and Japanese diplomats secretly negotiating a compromise agreement ahead of a key meeting last year of the International Whaling Commission, the body that regulates international whaling.

The American proposal would have forced Japan to reduce the number of whales that Japan killed each year in the Antarctic whale sanctuary in return for the legal right to hunt other whales off its own coasts. In addition, the US proposed to ratify laws that would "guarantee security in the seas" – a reference to acting against groups such as Sea Shepherd that have tried to physically stop whaling.

The US proposal was eventually shot down by Britain and the EU in June 2010, but the cables show that the Sea Shepherd group had become a political embarrassment to Japan after stopping its whaling fleet reaching its annual quota of whale killed for several years.

The Guardian