Humane Society International (HSI) secured all of its primary 2007 whale protection priorities at this year's meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which closed yesterday in Anchorage, Alaska. The preservation of the standing moratorium on commercial whaling, the erection of a barricade against Japan's upcoming CITES proposal threatening great whales, and movement toward an IWC workshop on climate change, HSI's stated objectives for IWC 59, all advanced.

With the return of the simple majority at IWC to the non-whaling bloc, the 21-year moratorium was in no direct danger, but Japan's revised plan to gain "community whaling" status for small scale minke whale hunts in four Japanese coastal districts came up in two separate forms at the weeklong meeting.

"The coastal communities' proposal is commercial whaling and would violate the moratorium," said Patricia Forkan, HSI president. "This year, Japan made special efforts to dress it up as a traditional hunt akin to those coming up for renewal under the IWC's aboriginal subsistence whaling (ASW) category. It didn't work."

A second HSI priority, the CITES-focused resolution affirming the continuing value of the commercial moratorium, was approved on the final day of the meeting, notwithstanding a Japan-led boycott of the vote. With Japan planning to ask the 171-member CITES convention to reconsider the international trade in meat and other parts of great whales just days from now, "the IWC needed to send a clear signal about the vitality and necessity of its commercial whaling moratorium," according to Kitty Block, HSI director of international treaties.

A proposal that the IWC Scientific Committee begin a serious investigation of the impacts of climate change on cetacean populations received the go-ahead and a modest amount of funding. HSI had stressed the need for such research in its opening statement.

In a year in which many observers expressed doubts that the IWC would survive for a 60th meeting, HSI officials were skeptical of Japan's threats to leave the organization and set up a new one favorable to its interests. "Japan surpassed itself this year, tactically and rhetorically, in attempting to subvert the integrity of the IWC," Forkan says. "But the delegates were able to agree on the ASW quotas, on resolutions concerning safety at sea and whale watching, and to get through a difficult negotiation on the expanded requests from Greenland. In respect to these issues, the IWC demonstrated its resilience and its continuing relevance to the protection of whales all over the world."

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Humane Society International (HSI) is the international division of The Humane Society of the United States, the nation's largest animal protection organization. HSI has worked for decades to protect whales. On the web at humanesociety.org.