Captain Paul Watson is a free man after his highly publicized arrest. Photo: Captain Paul Watson Foundation
After five months in a Danish prison, Captain Paul Watson, is a free man.
Watson, an anti-whaling and animal-rights activist, was arrested by Danish police on July 21, 2024. In a peculiar twist, his incarceration was the result of an international warrant issued by Japan. According to reports, it was something of a political move that was related to Watson’s Antarctic whaling campaigns and the fact that Watson has never pulled punches when it comes to his thoughts on Japanese whaling practices.
“Japan deliberately targets pregnant minke whales,” Watson told The Dodo a few years ago. “The fetuses are a large part of their ‘research.’ The objective of their efforts is to gather data to support a return to full-scale commercial whaling in the Southern Ocean. These operations are in defiance of the verdict of the International Court of Justice and the global moratorium on commercial whaling as ruled by the International Whaling Commission.”
At the time of his arrest, there was a decent chance that Watson would be extradited to Japan, where he would have faced the possibility of 15 years in prison.
Watson’s tactics, described by him as “aggressive non-violence,” have never sat well with the powers-that-be. The cofounder of Greenpeace left the organization because those tactics were, according to him, “too confrontational” for the group. Then he founded Sea Shepherd, which was once labeled as “pirates” by a U.S. court. Watson left — or was forced to leave — Sea Shepherd in 2022 as the group wanted to move to less controversial methods. He then established the Captain Paul Watson Foundation.
The Japanese Coast Guard wanted to arrest Watson after a scuffle in 2010 with a Japanese whaling research ship. Authorities said he ordered the captain of the Sea Shepherd vessel to throw explosives at the Japanese boat.
“Well, it’s a total fabrication,” Watson said. “We never used explosives. Ever. We did use stink bombs, which are quite harmless.”
Although Watson isn’t officially a part of the group he co-founded, he still fights for the vision that became clear to him in the 1970s. He will fight for cetaceans, no matter what governments say about their rights. In his decades doing that, he’s likely very used to confrontation, but a Danish prison was a little more than he was used to. When he walked out the doors, it was a moment he’d been waiting on for months.
“I’m certainly quite relieved,” Watson, 74, said to the Associated Press during a video interview from Nuuk, Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory. “This gives me an opportunity to return home to my two children before Christmas.”
The Japanese embassy in Copenhagen has not issued a statement on Watson’s release, as of this writing, but he was held in Denmark under the Japanese warrant. Denmark does not have an extradition treaty with Japan, so whether he’d be sent there was a question mark until his release. He’s still not exactly out of the woods, though.
“I have to make sure that I don’t land in Iceland or another country where Interpol might try to have me arrested again,” he said to the AP. “Apparently, the red notice is still there.”
A red notice is a system used worldwide in order to catch people who’ve been branded as fugitives in different countries. Interpol did confirm that the red notice is indeed still active, so Watson runs the risk of being arrested again.
“It is each member country’s decision whether to arrest an individual who is the subject of a red notice,” Interpol said, “which is not an international arrest warrant.”
Watson will head to France, which gave him honorary citizenship just a few days ago.
“I think it all backfired on Japan, because this has put enormous focus on Japan’s continued illegal whaling operations,” Watson said. “So my time here for five months has actually served a purpose. It’s been an opportunity to continue to expose Japan’s illegal whaling activities.”
