13 Aug 2024 11:15AM(Updated: 13 Aug 2024 11:25AM)

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/world/anti-whaling-activist-watson-face-greenland-detention-hearing-4543271

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COPENHAGEN: American-Canadian anti-whaling activist Paul Watson, arrested in July in Greenland, will face a judge on Thursday (Aug 15) who will rule on his continued detention as a possible extradition requested by Japan looms.

The district court in Nuuk – the capital of the autonomous Danish territory – will rule on whether there is cause to extend his detention for up to another four weeks.

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“The hearing on Aug 15, 2024 will therefore not deal with the question of whether or not to extradite him,” police said in a statement.

The decision on whether he will be extradited to Japan, which ultimately will be up to the Danish Ministry of Justice, will be taken independently.

Nevertheless, it will still be discussed at the hearing, his lawyer Jonas Christoffersen told a press conference on Monday.

“As a starting point, you would say that a person should be detained during the extradition case, because otherwise there could be a risk that the person would leave,” Christoffersen said.

Watson, who featured in the reality TV series Whale Wars, founded Sea Shepherd and the Captain Paul Watson Foundation (CPWF), and is known for radical tactics including confrontations with whaling ships at sea.

The 73-year-old campaigner was arrested on Jul 21 when the ship John Paul DeJoria docked in Nuuk to refuel.

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“RED NOTICE”

The vessel was on its way to “intercept” a new Japanese whaling factory vessel in the North Pacific, according to the CPWF.

Watson was arrested on the basis of a 2012 Interpol “Red Notice” after Japan accused him of causing damage to one of its whaling ships in the Antarctic two years earlier and causing injury.

Only Japan, Iceland and Norway allow commercial whaling.

Lamya Essemlali, president of Sea Shepherd’s French branch, has told AFP that Watson believes his arrest to be political, with Japan wanting him because he is a “political symbol”.

Essemlali explained Monday that the arrest warrant had been made confidential and was no longer listed on Interpol’s website, and Watson would otherwise not have stopped in Nuuk.

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“All this was orchestrated. After all, 14 federal police officers and a Danish public prosecutor were put on a direct plane to Greenland to arrest Paul.”

Japan asked Danish authorities to extradite him at the end of July.

In Japan, Watson faces a charge of causing injury, which can carry up to 15 years in prison or a fine of up to ¥500,000 (US$3,300).

He also faces a charge of forcible obstruction of business, which carries a penalty of up to three years in prison or a fine of up to ¥500,000.

“PRESUMPTION OF GUILT”

At the upcoming hearing in Nuuk, Watson’s lawyers intend to argue the detention he has already been subjected to is not proportional to the offence of which he is suspected.

“We will argue that the three weeks that have passed is more than enough and you can’t extend it further than that,” Christoffersen said.

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With Watson’s history of activism, Essemlali said that Japan would not be lenient, and given his age he would likely spend the rest of his life incarcerated.

“We absolutely want to avoid his extradition to Japan, because we know that if he is extradited to Japan, he won’t get out alive”, Essemlali said.

Francois Zimeray, another one of Watson’s lawyers, also blasted the Japanese legal system on Monday.

“In Japan, there is a presumption of guilt and the prosecutors are proud to announce that they have a 99.6 percent conviction rate,” Zimeray said.

Watson’s arrest has sparked a series of protests calling for his release.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s office has asked Denmark not to extradite the activist, who has lived in France for the past year.

Source: AFP/ec

The agency has added 24 pathogens to its pandemic watchlist, as scientists race to predict what will cause the next global outbreak

Sarah Newey, Global Health Security Correspondent, in Bangkok13 August 2024 • 4:54pm

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/who-pandemic-black-death-bird-flu-pathogens-disease/

Related Topics

• World Health Organisation, 
• Pandemics and epidemics, 
• Bubonic plague, 
• Bird Flu, 
• Monkeypox, 
• Global Health Security

13

The Black Death plague, bird flu and mpox are among 24 threats that have been added to an influential watchlist of the pathogens that could trigger the next pandemic.

In the first update since Covid-19 swept the planet, a World Health Organisation (WHO) panel has dramatically expanded the scope of its index of so-called priority pathogens.

Already notorious diseases like Zika, yellow fever and avian influenza have been added, alongside lesser known threats such as Sin Nombre virus – which jumps from deer mice to people and has a fatality rate of 30 per cent in the US. Several bacteria, including cholera, the plague and salmonella, have also been incorporated for the first time.

The watchlist may sound like more WHO jargon – especially its name, the R&D Blueprint for Epidemics – but its contents have become hugely influential since the first iteration was published in 2017.

Not only did it popularise the concept of ‘Disease X’, an as yet unknown pandemic threat, but the exercise pointed out the most dangerous diseases for which there were no vaccines, diagnostics or treatments. Since then, it has been used by scientists and research consortiums around the world to prioritise research.

“In our world, [the blueprint] has been a very big deal,” said Dr Richard Hatchett, chief executive of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi), which funds vaccine research. “It helped focus attention on a set of pathogens that had been neglected, effectively because there were no commercial drivers for countermeasure development.”

He pointed to one example as the “signal success” to date: Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers), a close relative of Covid which featured on the first priority pathogen list.

“That certainly helped those of us who were trying to fund programmes to justify our investments in developing Mers vaccines,” Dr Hatchett told the Telegraph. “And it was that investment in solving the general coronavirus design problem that, I think, enabled the rapid pivot to Covid.

“At least the Moderna vaccine and the AstraZeneca vaccine were direct pivots from the Mers vaccine development programmes, so to that extent it’s been really, really important,” he said.

But while pre-pandemic lists focused on a narrow set of around a dozen priority diseases, the latest blueprint includes well over 30. It also creates a set of prototype pathogens for 22 major families of viruses, in an attempt to replicate the success seen with Mers and Covid.

Dr Hatchett said this updated approach was not so much a reflection of a major shift in the underlying risk each disease presents, but an evolution in the thinking of the scientific community about how best to prepare for pandemic threats.

“By getting to know as much as we can about each of the pathogen families that are most likely to harbour the next pandemic-causing disease, scientists can get a head start in creating new medical defences such as vaccines and treatments that can be swiftly adapted to target a new disease,” he said.

“Think of it as a jigsaw, with each family representing a part of the puzzle. The new pathogen family framework maps out each of these families and will help to coordinate the efforts and resources of institutions around the globe… and put the pieces together to solve the problem of pandemics for the world.”

Speaking at the Global Pandemic Preparedness Summit in Brazil at the end of July, the WHO’s Dr Ana Maria Henao-Restrepo, who co-leads the project, used a different analogy: the ‘streetlight effect’.

“This is the metaphor of the drunken man looking for the lost keys under the streetlamp. The first place where the drunken man is going to look for his keys is under the light. The light areas are the pathogens for which we have a lot of information today, we know that they are global threats… but we want to expand that light area,” she said.

“So one way to expand… is [to use] prototype vaccines which are pathfinders, who will help us develop medical countermeasures that maybe can be useful for other pathogens in the same family.

She added: “So we are now promoting research in all the viral families, regardless of the pandemic threat potential that we perceive today, because the pandemic threat potential that we perceive today is based on the data and the knowledge that we have today.”

To further this strategy, the WHO has also announced that institutions across the world will become central hubs (dubbed a Collaborative Open Research Consortium, or Corc) for different pathogen families, leading and coordinating work between partners – from funders to researchers and regulators.

But Dr Henao-Restrepo added that it is “improbable” that the next pandemic will be caused by a disease we know – which is why experts must still plan for Disease X.

“The concept of pathogen X… says there is uncertainty, and there are pathogens in these less illuminated, less studied areas that we still need to pay attention to,” she warned.

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