Slowly but inexorably, the heavy hand against environmental protest actions is falling more and more heavily – which implies heavy criminal sanctions – on environmentalists.
In this context, it is appropriate to announce on Wednesday, September 4, whether Denmark will extradite anti-whaling activist Paul Watson to Japan, so that he can be tried there for crimes that carry a sentence of up to 15 years in prison in that country. Watson was arrested in Greenland on July 21. A few days earlier, a British judge had sentenced five people to four and five years in prison for blocking traffic on the United Kingdom’s busiest motorway. At the end of the month, the same magistrate notified the two activists who had soiled the protective glass of sunflowers that they should prepare themselves “practically and emotionally” to end up behind bars. The precise sentence will be known in September.
Shortly before learning his criminal fate, Watson told AFP that “Japan wants him to be an example.” The country accuses him of attacking a ship hunting whales during a self-described “scientific campaign” in the Arctic in 2010. The International Criminal Court ruled in 2014 that the campaigns were illegal because they violated a ban on commercial whaling agreed by the International Whaling Commission, to which Japan was then a member – it eventually abandoned it in 2018 and resumed commercial whaling in 2019.
“I just changed ships. My ship is now called Nuuk Prison,” the anti-whaler said from the cell, referring to the facility where he was held after his arrest. Watson had stopped in Greenland on his voyage to intercept Japanese company Kyodo Senpaku’s new whale-hunting ship, the Kangei Maru. “They want to send the message that they don’t mess with their whalers,” the activist said. “I didn’t do anything, and even if I had, the penalty in Denmark would be a fine of 1,500 kroner, with no prison sentence. And Japan wants to sentence me to 15 years in prison,” he said of his possible extradition.
“Fans”
The harshness against environmental activism is increasing year by year. In July, British judge Christopher Hehir jailed the five members of the Just Stop Oil organisation who blocked London’s south ring road in 2022. The convicts appealed, but the magistrate told them that “they had crossed the line from concerned activists” to “fans”. Prosecutors estimated that the four days of road chaos caused by the protests had cost €900,000.
In the case of the young women who threw soup on the glass of the Van Gogh painting in October 2022, Hehir himself told them when they were convicted that they had been “within a glass’s breadth of destroying one of the most beautiful works of art.” precious art in the world.” The next day, the 27th, he will let them know how long they will spend in prison.
In 2022, following actions such as sunflowers in London, that of Futuro Vegetal with The majas in the Prado or the Spanish scientists throwing colored water on the facade of the Congress, elDiario.es spoke with Will Potter, author of the investigation Greens are the new reds – who investigates the treatment of the environmental movement in the United States and likens its persecution to that of communism in the 1950s – the journalist predicted that he would not be surprised “if acts of protest like these were punished disproportionately or labeled terrorism.”
Just two years later, as the sanctions for these acts have been coming in, the trend has become so clear that human rights officials at the UN are constantly protesting. The rapporteur on human rights in the context of climate change, Ian Fry, has warned that such harsh sentences “have a potential impact on civil society and activists”. His colleague Michael Frost, who sent several letters of protest to the British executive after learning of last July’s decision against the Just Stop Oil members, called it a “black day for peaceful protest”. “The sentence is not reasonable, proportionate and does not meet a legitimate aim.”
“In 1974, my goal was to eradicate whaling and I hope to achieve that before I die,” Paul Watson concluded from his prison, waiting to hear whether he will be sent to Japan.
