Sir

When asked what he thought of Western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi is said to have replied: “That would be a good idea”. Simmonds and Stroud1 ask the scientific community to support their call for a global sanctuary to protect whales from direct killing in all maritime waters; some of us think that, too, would be a good idea, especially as your correspondents appear to wish also to stop what the International Whaling Commission (IWC) quaintly calls “aboriginal subsistence whaling” as well as the much larger scale commercial and “scientific” kinds.

But we have to ask what exactly is this global sanctuary? After all, scientists consider themselves to be rigorous in such matters. Ireland has called for one covering all offshore waters, essentially those beyond national jurisdictions, and as part of a proposed package deal to end the enduring impasse between whaling and non-whaling countries. That I understand, but Simmonds and Stroud don't mean that. If they want a sanctuary to stop all commercial whaling everywhere, then one has already been agreed: it is called an indefinite moratorium, and it was agreed in 1982, coming into force in 1986. The trouble is that under applicable international law there are loopholes that are ruthlessly exploited by Norway and Japan and effectively negate the 1982 decision. And Japan does not even honour the sanctuary declared in the Southern Ocean in 1994.

IWC decisions are also not applicable to countries that do not belong to the organization and, further, the IWC cannot prevent its member states walking out whenever they feel like it.

I wonder under what legal mechanism Simmonds and Stroud would wish to see their “global sanctuary” established and how would they propose that any declaration of it be made binding on all states? By the United Nations, perhaps?

The scientific community, to whom Simmonds' and Stroud's call is addressed, could instead better rest its support for whale conservation and protection on science. The IWC has agreed on the most thoroughly science-based, the most fully tested procedure for regulating use of a living marine resource that has ever been proposed; it is called the Revised Management Procedure (RMP) and it is extraordinarily precautionary in approach2. If applied to all whale species and stocks it would, considering their states and the conditions of past exploitation, give zero commercial quotas for nearly all of them, for many, many years to come. Non-zero quotas would emerge for minke whales, but most of those would be protected if Japan were persuaded to honour the Southern Ocean sanctuary, because that is where 80-90% of the world's minke whales live.

So for the scientific community the rational approach is (1) to secure the protection of Antarctic waters; (2) to apply the RMP elsewhere; (3) to complete the proposed Revised Management Scheme (which includes the RMP) so that there is convincing inspection and international control over all whaling, including — as protection against unlawful trade — a DNA database, to be held by the IWC, and containing information about every whale legally killed.