(Q24N) Shielded from extradition requests by Costa Rica and Japan, controversial Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson is now living as international fugitive in France, granting him political asylum.
On Interpol’s Red List, Watson is a marine vigilante who’s done jail time for extradition requests. Yet to many, he’s also a heroic marine conservationist who risks his life and those of his crew to save countless endangered whales, turtles, dolphins and sharks from slaughter.
Love him or loathe him, Paul Watson, the 65-year-old, silver-haired founder of Sea Shepherd and co-founder of Greenpeace is now a celebrity because of his job: ramming whaling boats for a living.
Watson has a hit U.S. reality TV series, Whale Wars, that has aired on the Discovery Channel since 2008 about his organization’s fight against Japanese whalers. And his influence reached new heights with the award-winning documentary Sharkwater, which conservationists say resulted in shark finning being banned worldwide.
The tactics have landed him in the legal hot water even as they boost his renown. During an interview with The Associated Press in Paris, Watson — a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen — was stopped four times in the street by fans of all nationalities who asked for autographs.
“The camera is the most powerful weapon we’ve ever invented, so we had to utilize that weapon. That’s why we created the (reality) show,” he said.
Watson asserts that the charges are trumped up. Watson now lives as an international fugitive in a luxurious 18th-century chateau near Bordeaux.
“It’s not bad,” he said with a smile to Associated Press.
Japan says Watson allegedly masterminded Sea Shepherd’s disruption of Japanese whale hunts in the Antarctic Ocean and thus put whalers’ lives at risk during the hunt.
Watson said the original charges from Japan — the world’s biggest whaling nation — date from 2010, when a Japanese whaling vessel cut a US$2 million Sea Shepherd boat in half. The Sea Shepherd captain then boarded the Japanese ship — “to confront the whaler who just destroyed his boat” — and was summarily arrested. Watson claims the captain “made a deal” with the Japanese to suspend his sentence “in return for him saying that I ordered him to board.”
Watson says the Costa Rica request is also trumped up and is linked to the Japanese charges.
“I don’t love the celebrity thing, but it’s what gets the message across,” Watson said, citing supporters including Christian Bale, William Shatner, Pierce Brosnan, Sean Connery and Richard Dean Anderson. “We can’t lose because we’ve got two James Bonds, Batman, Captain Kirk and MacGyver on our advisory board.”
Isn’t he forgetting Robert Redford, who is also on the board?
“Robert Redford wasn’t a superhero in Captain America, he was a villain,” he laughed.
Read the original article at the Calgary Herald.
Paul Watson claims to have had the authority to detain and escort the Varadero I yet he obviously lacked the documentation and witnesses to establish these claims, causing him to flee both Costa Rica and Germany. And one has to wonder if this authority included the ability to flood engines and cause collisions.
This article is also not fully researched in regards to the January 2010 Ady Gil collision it references. Maritime New Zealand established that the vessel had collided with the Shonan Maru II, not the other way around.
The helmsman of the vessel panicked and accelerated into the Japanese vessel according to his testimony, as stipulated in Maritime New Zealand’s November 2010 report. And this report also confirms that the Ady Gil was not cut in half but had it’s nose cone damaged, a fact later established in September 2015 when an arbitrator ruled that the vessel was salvageable and “wrongfully” sank by Sea Shepherd without the vessel’s owner’s knowledge of consent.
In regards to saving endangered whales, Japan is no longer taking endangered whales from the Southern Ocean Whaling Sanctuary and the taking of 333 non-endangered whales per year on an estimated population of 670,000 is not likely to cause the “oceans to die”, as implied by Sea Shepherd’s catch phrase.
Japan had cancelled their plans to take humpback whales in the area in December 2007 in response to an IWC resolution passed earlier that year and the IUCN Red List confirms a lack of urgency in regards to the remaining target.
Case ID 12-35266 has established a lack of authority in Sea Shepherd to impose IWC’s voluntary moratoriums, scheduled and policies and the International Court of Justice has not referred to an international law when it demanded the end of JARPA II in their March 31st, 2014 ruling. The term “illegal” didn’t even appear in the later, which is online for everyone to read.