Professor Chris Wold’s Reflections on the International Whaling Commission Meeting

The meeting held different values depending on one’s perspective. For the IWC’s Australian chair, the meeting’s centerpiece was achieving a “historic consensus” on the Hobart Declaration, a unified statement of the IWC’s purpose. That consensus, however, came at a cost. For example, while the original draft declaration broadly called for “meaningful engagement” of indigenous peoples in decision making that affects them, the final declaration instead calls for the IWC to “work closely” with them, with the context indicating such engagement would be for the sole purpose of establishing whaling quotas for them. As such, the IWC will not need to engage those indigenous populations, such as those in Australia, who consider whales as family members or elders that should not be hunted. Also, unlike the IWC’s 2018 Florianópolis Declaration, which reaffirms the importance of maintaining the moratorium on commercial whaling,” the Hobart Declaration omits any reference to the moratorium.

Professor Chris WoldOn the positive side, the Hobart Declaration might have settled some arguments over the IWC’s authority by stating that the Commission “remains the world’s primary intergovernmental organisation responsible for the global management and conservation of whales … and other cetaceans” (emphasis added). This provision should be read as agreeing that the IWC has competence to manage small cetaceans and address entanglement in fishing gear, two hotly contested issues, about which Professor Wold has recently written. Moreover, this statement should end debate over whether the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission, an intergovernmental body without a management mandate, has a role that supersedes the IWC as an “appropriate international organizations for their conservation, management and study” of whales.

In other decisions, the IWC rejected a proposal to create the South Atlantic Whale Sanctuary for the 13th time, and Switzerland withdrew its proposed resolution to address the hunting small cetaceans for bait. In better news, the IWC adopted a non-binding resolution on the global trade in fish maw (swim bladders) and incidental catches of threatened cetaceans. Growing demand for fish maws, for the luxury food market in Asia and their investment value, is driving unsustainable fisheries that cause significant bycatch of cetaceans, as well as sharks, rays, and sea turtles. Despite the importance of addressing these impacts, the United States voted “no” due to the resolution’s reference to the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In fact, the United States was in a “vote no” mood on other issues, also joining a tiny minority of IWC members voting against a resolution to address the impact vessel strikes on cetaceans. The IWC also adopted by consensus a resolution on cetacean strandings as a cross-cutting priority of the IWC.

Debates over substance, but expressed along political lines, heavily influenced the IWC’s failure, once again, to adopt a definition of and purpose for quorum. The IWC Rules of Procedure define quorum unremarkably as a simple majority of all members, but then remarkably do not describe why quorum is relevant. The IWC has been locked in a battle between those members that interpret quorum as the current simple majority of all members and those that want to redefine it as a simple majority of those having delegations at the meeting, a rule found in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species and the Convention on Migratory Species, among others. They seek a lower denominator to make it harder for pro-whaling countries to prevent decision-making on issues they oppose, like the South Atlantic Whale Sanctuary, by walking out of the meeting, as they did most recently in 2022.

The debate over procedure is, of course, a proxy for achieving substantive goals. With members supporting commercial whaling typically outnumbered by those from the so-called likeminded, they have looked for alternative ways to prevent adoption of conservation decisions, including walkouts to break quorum. Pro-conservation members hope that a new quorum rule based on those in attendance will help secure adoption of the South Atlantic Whale Sanctuary and prevent bad faith efforts to destabilize the IWC by, for example, blocking adoption of the budget. The sustainable use bloc, comprising a number of South Pacific, African and Caribbean nations supported by Japan, facing a numerical disadvantage in voting prefers to maintain quorum rules based on a higher denominator.

Eighty years after its adoption and 40 years after enactment of the commercial whaling moratorium, the IWC remains locked in old and deep divisions over whaling. But whaling is no longer the most immediate threat to cetaceans today and, in its 9th decade, the IWC continues to deliver important conservation progress for cetaceans.