Sea Shepherd founder, reality TV star, and alleged “eco-terrorist” Paul Watson has been arrested by Danish authorities and is facing possible extradition to Japan.
Watson arrived in Nuuk, Greenland on July 22 aboard the John Paul Dejoria vessel. The plan was to refuel the boat and sail to the northern Pacific where the crew would tussle with a Japanese whaling ship. But those plans have been delayed. “We were immediately boarded by a SWAT team and Danish police who wasted no time in cuffing Paul Watson, our founder, and arresting him on a decades-old red notice at the request of Japan,” Locky MacLean, captain of the John Paul Dejora, said in a post on X.
This morning, Captain Paul Watson was arrested in Nuuk, Greenland by Danish federal police, who boarded the M/Y John Paul DeJoria as soon as it docked.
The crew had stopped to refuel while en route to the Northwest Passage as part of #OpKangeiMaru, our campaign aimed at… pic.twitter.com/ANWoRFiR42
— Captain Paul Watson Foundation 🐋🏴☠️ (@CaptPaulWatson) July 21, 2024
Watson along with Sea Shepherd has worked for decades to disrupt commercial whaling. He’s lauded as a hero of the movement by some and derided as a terrorist by others. Watson and Sea Shepherd use direct action to mess with whaling vessels operations and those tactics are the source of decades of legal trouble.
Watson began his career in the late 1960s and was an early and influential member of Greenpeace before later falling out with the group. He went on to found Sea Shepherd and has led the group in multiple successful operations against whaling vessels in the decades since.
In 1986, the group boarded two whaling ships in Iceland in the dead of night and successfully scuttled them. Watson has repeatedly claimed to have harassed and sunk multiple ships. Sea Shepherd’s ships frequently collide with other vessels in the ocean and detractors have accused the group of using rifles to sink small vessels and create chaos.
Japan and Watson have been at odds for a long time. The Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR), a Japanese scientific research organization funded by Japanese fishers, maintains a list of Watson’s supposed violent activities. The ICR has also killed hundreds of whales in the pursuit of what it says is scientific research into the animals.
Japan first obtained an arrest warrant against Watson in 2010. At the time, Japan’s coast guard claimed Watson was wanted on suspicion of assault and disrupting the business practices of the Japanese whaling industry. “There is no doubt that the motives of the Japanese coast guard and the Japanese government are political,” Watson told The Guardian at the time.
Things are a lot different in 2024. UN Courts have handed down multiple judgments against Japan’s various whaling activities and Watson has always maintained that Sea Shepherd is acting to enforce international laws on the high seas. This new arrest appears to be a Red Notice—an international arrest warrant issued by Interpol—connected to the old Japanese issue warrant.
“It is believed that this arrest is connected to a previous Red Notice issued for Watson’s anti-whaling activities in the Antarctic,” a group connected to Watson said in a post on X. “This development comes as a surprise since the Foundation’s lawyers had reported that the Red Notice had been withdrawn. However, it appears that Japan had made the notice confidential to facilitate Paul’s travel for the purpose of making an arrest. Paul is currently in custody, and it is unclear if Denmark will extradite him to Japan.”
It’s not the first time Watson, who is 73, has sat in jail while waiting for lawyers to sort things out. When he was 29, a court in Quebec convicted him to 10 days in prison and an $8,000 fine after he assaulted a fisheries officer. Watson was part of a group that disrupted a seal hunt.
