Anti-whaling activist Paul Watson has been arrested in Greenland on an international arrest warrant issued by Japan, authorities and his foundation said.
Mr Watson, star of the reality TV show Whale Wars, was arrested when his ship docked in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, police said in a statement.
According to the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, the arrest is believed to be related to an Interpol Red Notice for Mr Watson’s previous interventions in the Antarctic region against whaling.
The 73-year-old will be brought before a district court with a request to hold him pending a decision on his possible extradition to Japan, police said.
Film material posted by his foundation on X Officers are seen handcuffing Mr. Watson on the ship John Paul DeJoria, putting him in a police van and driving him away.
His foundation said it was “completely shocked as the Red Alert had already disappeared a few months ago”.
“We were surprised because it could have meant it had been erased or classified. We now understand that Japan classified it to give Paul a false sense of security,” Locky MacLean, the foundation’s director of ship operations, said in a statement.
“We urge the Danish government to release Captain Watson and not to comply with this politically motivated request.”
Greenland is an autonomous Danish dependent territory with self-government and its own parliament.
In 2012, a Red Notice was issued against Mr. Watson. According to Interpol, he was wanted by Japan for causing damage and injury in two incidents in the Antarctic Ocean in 2010 involving a Japanese whaling ship.
The Japanese government has not commented, but a spokeswoman for the Japanese coast guard told AFP news agency it was aware of the arrest.
Mr Watson’s foundation said he was en route to “intercept the new Japanese factory ship, the Kangei Maru, in the North Pacific”.
The ship, which left Japan in May, slaughters whales caught and killed by smaller vessels.
Activists had already targeted the Kangei Maru’s predecessor before 2019, when Japan was hunting whales in the Antarctic and North Pacific for what it called “scientific” purposes.
Japan withdrew from the International Whaling Commission in 2019 and now only conducts commercial whaling in its own waters on what it calls a sustainable scale.
However, Mr Watson’s foundation is convinced that Japan plans to resume high-seas whaling in the Southern Ocean and North Pacific as early as next year.
In a statement, the group said the “reactivation” of the Red Notice against Mr Watson “is politically motivated and coincides with the launch of a newly built whale processing factory ship”.
Mr. Watson’s decades of activism have won him a following around the world, but his aggressive tactics have also drawn criticism and legal challenges.
Some of that criticism comes from Greenpeace, which Mr Watson claims to be a co-founder, despite the group’s deny this.
