Exposed: Secret Meeting Could End Whale Protections

Exposed: Secret Meeting Could End Whale Protections

We’ve learned about a secret meeting that could mean the end of years of whale protection.

During the week of December 8, 2008, a group of member countries from the International Whaling Commission (IWC) will meet in Cambridge, England to consider lifting the ban on commercial whaling.

Please take action now to stop this from happening by sending and email to Secretary of Commerce, Carlos M. Gutierrez, and ask him to keep whale protection a public issue.

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Message Recipients

Carlos M. Gutierrez - Secretary of Commerce

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Dear (recipient name),

I write on behalf of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) to express my deep concerns about the upcoming meeting of the International Whaling Commission's (IWC) Small Working Group to be held in Cambridge, England, during the week of 8 December as it poses grave risks to the survival of the IWC and the whales it was established to protect.

IFAW is very concerned that the decision to effectively hold upcoming IWC Small Working Group meetings in secret is inconsistent with the declared intentions of modernizing the IWC. Transparency and public participation in international fora has sharply increased in the six decades since the IWC was established. By closing the upcoming Small Working Group meetings to civil society representatives, non-governmental experts and the media, the IWC is taking a dramatic step backwards.

Threats to whales have increased markedly in the sixty years since the IWC was founded.  Marine pollution and habitat destruction, entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with high-speed vessels combined with emerging threats such as ocean noise pollution and global climate change, are on the increase.  These, combined with persistent efforts by three countries---Japan, Iceland and Norway---to resuscitate commercial whaling and the international trade in whale meat, mean our planet's great whales face more threats today than at any time in history.  In the face of these threats, the 80 member countries of the IWC have an opportunity and obligation to modernize the Commission to become an organization that protects whales, instead of one that simply manages their exploitation.

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