Author: Luke Nottage

This year, Australia Day (26th January) fell on Chinese Lunar New Year, so there were a few more events celebrating Chinese traditions as well as the ever more frequent display of Australian flags around Sydney. But the day after, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a front-page story entitled ‘Revealed: secret whale deal‘. It highlighted the Federal Government’s involvement in generating a proposal whereby:

• Japanese whalers could hunt a regulated number of minke whales in its coastal waters, and take many more whales in the North Pacific, under the plan.
• Japan would agree to one of two offers in exchange: either to phase out scientific whaling in the Antarctic entirely, or to impose an annual Southern Ocean limit.
• The proposal was hammered out in secret by an International Whaling Commission drafting group of six nations, which includes Australia and Japan, at a meeting in Britain last month.

With the whaling season already underway, however, Australia’s Environment Minister insists that this is still under negotiation and that the Government remains opposed to any commercial whaling. But one NGO – the International Fund for Animal Welfare – calls this ‘Whalergate’, criticising the opaque nature of the IWC.

The article didn’t mention that the IFAW had recently released a report commissioned from the Canberra Panel of Independent Legal and Policy Experts, which questioned the legality of Japan’s Antarctic whaling program from the perspective of the Antarctic Treaty System. Dr Tim Stephens, a Sydney University international law expert, was on that Panel and provides a summary on his own blog. The Report endorses some arguments for Australia to challenge the legitimacy of Japan’s whaling program before the International Court of Justice or the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea.

A rather different view comes, perhaps unsurprisingly, from a different discipline. Dr Charlotte Epstein, an international relations specialist at the University of Sydney, shows in her new book how views and behaviour about whaling are caught up in broader and evolving discourses, interacting with – but not reducible to – the material interests of states, organisations and individuals. I review The Power of Words in International Relations: Birth of an Anti-Whaling Discourse on my own blog focused on Japanese law in context, which partially overlaps with my postings to East Asia Forum.

Her perspective also helps to explain what I identified here last year as internally inconsistent positions adopted by both Australian and Japanese governments, which material interests help to explain but not completely. To move forward on a complex issue like whaling, I still think we need to nurture forums and processes allowing law, science, economics, politics and broader societal discourse to interact more productively. Revitalising the IWC or activating international tribunals may help, but so may some new type of regional arrangement.

Meanwhile, relations between Australia and Japan are bound to heat up again as the whaling season proceeds.

Related articles:

1. Japan and Australia: stalled in domestic politics
2. Japan is at ease in the house of the risen Rudd-san

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2. India no spoiler in trade talks
3. Japan: A pox on both their houses?

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2009 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Environment and Climate Change, International Relations, Japan, Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.