Legendary Canadian environmentalist Captain Paul Watson’s detention in a Greenland jail has just been extended by another three weeks, bringing his total time in remand to 94 days.
The Bob Brown Foundation says it is calling on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong to do all they can to see Paul Watson released and to get Denmark to ‘end this completely baseless detention of an environmental hero’.
Captain Watson was one of the original founders of the Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd organisations, before starting his own foundation and returning to ocean activism with Neptune’s Pirates.
Arrested for upholding conservation law
‘Captain Paul Watson will now be held for over three months simply for defending whales from being slaughtered in Antarctica,’ said Alistair Allan, Antarctic and Marine campaigner at the Bob Brown Foundation.
‘It is outrageous that Denmark continues to punish an environmental hero for upholding conservation law in Antarctica.
‘Australia must now stand up for Captain Paul Watson, as it did for the great whales in Antarctica that we cherish here.
‘Prime Minister Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong can and must do more and demand that Denmark free Paul Watson,’ said Mr Allan.
Former Tasmania senator and living legend Bob Brown has also made a personal appeal to Tasmanian-born Queen Mary of Denmark to seek justice for the Canadian activist.
‘Watson’s case will shame Copenhagen in the eyes of the world if it acts as the lickspittle of Tokyo whose cruel and bloody whaling in Antarctic waters ended in 2014 because it was found to be illegal by the International Court of Justice,’ said Mr Brown.
‘In 2008, the Australian Federal Court ruled that the Japanese whaling was a criminal activity. Watson’s Sea Shepherd organisation was the good green cop on the Antarctica beat in the absence of any government physically moving to uphold international law.
‘Denmark is now complicit in aiding and abetting the criminals to imprison the law-keeper. It is treading where the United States and France refused to go,’ he said.
‘I am well aware of the constitutional restraints on the monarchy in Denmark but there is enormous respect for Her Majesty Queen Mary here in her native Tasmania and, at the same time, huge support for Watson who was pivotal to getting the illegal Japanese whale-killers out of our oceans.
‘The campaign to free Watson from his Danish-Japanese captors will be full-on, global and relentless,’ said Bob Brown.
Find out more at the Free Paul Watson website.
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