Eritrea joins Tanzania and the Republic of Congo as recent
members of the 82-nation IWC.
All three African countries joined talks in Tokyo in March,
which a Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement said then
were aimed at “obtaining understanding for Japan’s position on
sustainable whaling”.
The Opposition environment spokesman, Greg Hunt, said IWC vote
buying was unacceptable.
“Mr Rudd should take the issue of vote buying directly to the
Japanese,” he said yesterday. “His concern about whaling appears to
have evaporated from the day he became Prime Minister.”
A spokesman for the Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, said
Australia would welcome the opportunity to meet new IWC member
countries and discuss recent developments in cetacean science.
Eritrea is a single-party state accused by neighbouring Ethiopia
this month of training and arming terrorists. It is ranked 157th
out of 177 nations in the UN Human Development Index and 126th on
Transparency International’s Global Corruption Index.
“We do not know their views on whales, or why a small,
desperately poor country, where 80 per cent of the population is
involved in farming and herding, would want to join the IWC,
although it is not hard to guess” said John Frizell, of Greenpeace
International.
Meanwhile there is little evidence that an attempt to find a
consensus on the future of the IWC is progressing. A meeting of
inner-circle IWC nations, including Australia, in Florida is
understood to have developed a list of divisive issues for further
meetings to consider.
