Highlights for Thursday, 31 January 2008
Participants at the Second Pew Whale Symposium resumed their discussions today.
During a session entitled “How can a way forward be found?,” presentations were made by: Amb. Eduardo Iglesias, International Whaling Commission (IWC) Commissioner for Argentina; Richard Cowan, IWC Commissioner for the United Kingdom (UK); Tetsu Sato, Nagano University; and Heather Sohl, WWF-UK.
In the ensuing discussion, participants addressed: killing of whales by anti-whaling countries through ship strikes and by-catch; small cetaceans management; “managing the impasse” versus “looking for a way forward”; the culling of whales for conservation and fisheries purposes; the role of trust; high-level ministerial participation in negotiations; and equitable appropriation of resources and design of management regimes.
In the afternoon, Richard Black, British Broadcasting Corporation, moderated a roundtable discussion entitled “The IWC process on its future: recommendations to the IWC Intersessional Meeting in March 2008”. Delegates discussed, among other things:
the role of science;
the functioning of the IWC;
NGO participation in IWC meetings;
“renovating” the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW);
cooperation with other organizations;
IWC meeting frequency;
motivations for the continuation of whaling;
a suggestion for a voluntary suspension and review of Japan’s scientific whaling programme;
and concrete suggestions for the IWC Intersessional Meeting in March, including appointing new representatives for the IWC, promoting consensus-based approaches rather than voting, and encouraging the chair to take an active role in conflict mediation.
Symposium Chair Neroni Slade presented a Chair’s summary of the meeting. He said the discussions had shown some clear areas of agreement, including that: the ICRW and the IWC have produced significant benefits for whale conservation; endangered species deserve absolute protection; and ultimately the solution to the whaling debate is political, not scientific. He said the most promising compromise would be a combination of actions which would: recognize potentially legitimate claims by coastal whaling communities; suspend scientific whaling in its current form and respect sanctuaries; and define a finite number of whales that can be taken by all of the world’s nations.
Chair Slade said an outcome document will be made available, stressing that it will be a Chair’s summary rather than a consensus document, and closed the meeting at 6:10 pm.
