American-Canadian activist was arrested in Greenland over a 2010 encounter with a Japanese whaling ship.
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00:00Free Paul Watson! Free Paul Watson!
00:03Fifteen members of the European Parliament have demanded the immediate release from jail of anti-whaling activist Paul Watson
00:10in front of the Danish embassy in Brussels.
00:13Japan issued an international arrest warrant in 2012 that accuses the activist of damaging a Japanese whaling ship.
00:19Early on Wednesday, a court in Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark,
00:24ruled to keep Watson in custody pending a decision to extradite him.
00:29It's a case of both human rights, because we're talking about sending a man to a country that doesn't respect the right to accuse Japan,
00:36but it's also a case of protecting environmentalists, because we have a criminalization of the ecological movement as a whole.
00:42We have to stand up for Paul Watson, who is currently under arrest for defending our livelihoods,
00:49for protecting the nature and the seas, and stopping Japan's illegal whaling practices.
00:56The activist was arrested in Greenland's capital Nuuk in July.
01:00If extradited to Japan, Watson, who has dual US-Canadian citizenship, faces a potential sentence of up to 15 years.
01:08Japan hunted around 300 whales last year, according to the International Whaling Commission, from which the country withdrew in 2019.
01:17An international moratorium on commercial whaling has been in place for more than 35 years.