The International Whaling Commission and the Future of Cetaceans in a Changing World

Abstract

The annual meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) are the most notorious and least decorous battlegrounds in international environmental law. Indeed, as The Economist recently asserted, they have the status of predictable events where the gap between the killers and the savers of whales never narrows. 1 Neither the Fifty-Third Meeting (IWC53), which took place in London from 23–27 July 2001, nor the Fifty-Fourth Meeting (IWC54), which took place in Shimonoseki, Japan from 20–24 May 2002, did anything to dispel this notion. Both meetings were redolent with the vituperation that has characterized the meetings of the parties to the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW) 2 over the past 15 years. As one non-government organization observer noted at IWC53, ‘this is the heart of darkness’. 3