The UN court’s ruling was in response to a landmark legal challenge to the Southern Ocean hunts by Australia, which claimed Japan was using science as a cover for commercial whaling.
Under the moratorium on commercial whaling Japan is allowed to sell meat from the “scientific” hunts on the open market, although consumption has fallen dramatically since the postwar years when it was a rare source of protein.
Tokyo hoped that its revised plan, involving the killing of fewer whales, would pave the way for the resumption of the Antarctic hunts, possibly by the end of this year.
Its whaling fleet recently returned from the Southern Ocean, although it had not planned to kill any whales, in accordance with the ICJ ruling.
“The ICJ ruling ensured that for the first season in more than a century whales in the southern hemisphere were not hunted for commercial purposes,” said Patrick Ramage, global whale programme director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
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“It is disappointing … that Japan’s fisheries bureaucrats would defy the world’s highest court and try to restart illegal whaling in the Southern Ocean.”
In its reworked plan Japan proposed an annual cull of up to 333 minke whales over the next 12 years, down from more than 900 a year previously. The total cull over that period would reach 3,996 whales, compared with the 13,000 whales it has killed since the IWC ban on commercial whaling came into effect in 1987.
Japan has long claimed that it needs to conduct “lethal research” to better understand whale populations’ migratory, feeding and reproduction habits with a view to a return to commercial whaling. It argues that many whale species, including minke, are not endangered.
Japanese officials said they would provide more information before the IWC’s scientific committee meets in San Diego next month. “I believe that we’ll move forward with the aim of resuming whaling around the end of the year,” the country’s commissioner to the IWC, Joji Morishita, told reporters, although he did not rule out changes to the proposal.
Morishita said Japan took the panel’s report seriously but added: “They haven’t unilaterally said that it’s no good; neither have they come out on the other side with ‘Go ahead, do whatever research you want to do.’”
Environmental campaigners welcomed the IWC panel’s decision. “[The findings] reiterate and underline the concern of the international community: you don’t need to kill whales in order to study them,” said Claire Bass, UK director of the Humane Society International.
“It has long been clear that Japan’s large-scale whaling operations are driven by politicians, not scientists, and serve no useful conservation or scientific need. This latest report from the IWC review panel essentially sends Japan back to the drawing board as it has failed to make a case for the need to kill whales in the name of science.”