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Anti-whaling activist laughs off Japan charges: ‘they can’t extradite me’
From detention in Greenland, US-Canadian campaigner Paul Watson, 73, dismissed the idea of spending 15 years in a ‘medieval’ Japanese jail
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Anti-whaling activist Paul Watson’s detention in a Greenland prison pending his possible extradition to Japan has not prevented him from continuing his fight to save the animals.
“If they think it prevents our opposition, I’ve just changed ship. My ship right now is Prison Nuuk,” the 73-year-old US-Canadian campaigner said, a mischievous smile crossing his face in the visitors’ room of Greenland’s Nuuk Prison.
Watson, who featured in the reality TV series Whale Wars and founded Sea Shepherd as well as the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, is known for radical tactics including confrontations with whaling ships at sea.
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He was arrested in July in Nuuk, the capital of the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland, on the basis of a 2012 Interpol arrest warrant issued by Japan, which accuses him of causing damage to one of its whaling ships in 2010 in the Antarctic.
It says he also injured a Japanese crew member with a stink bomb intended to disrupt the whalers’ activities, and has asked Denmark to extradite him to face trial.
Watson is being held behind bars pending the government’s decision, to make sure he does not flee.
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