By  ANGELA CHARLTON and JAMEY KEATENUpdated 10:02 AM PDT, July 22, 2025Share

PARIS (AP) — Interpol said Tuesday it was removing a most-wanted designation for anti-whaling campaigner Paul Watson, who is sought by Japan over an encounter with a whaling ship and who was jailed for several months last year in Greenland.

Watson, 74, is a former head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, whose high seas confrontations with whaling vessels have drawn support from celebrities and featured in the reality television series “Whale Wars.”

Japan wants his extradition over an encounter with a Japanese whaling research ship in 2010, when he was accused of obstructing the crew’s official duties by ordering the captain of his ship to throw explosives at the whaling ship. He and his team deny those allegations.

Starting in 2012, Watson had been subject to a “red notice” of Interpol, the Lyon, France-based international police body. A red notice is a request to law enforcement worldwide to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending legal action, based on a warrant from the judicial authorities in the requesting country, in this case Japan.

The Canadian-American activist — whose recent long white hair and beard give him a Santa Claus look — has long criss-crossed the world’s oceans in an almost singular focus on defending whales, feeding his popularity among environmentalists, animal-rights activists and others. Critics have questioned his often-combative methods.

Watson was arrested and jailed on the Japanese warrant last year in Greenland, a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, but released after five months.

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“My first reaction is that the decision ends 14 years of politically motivated persecution and underscores the blatant illegality of Japanese whaling operations in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary,” Watson said in a brief statement provided by Sea Shepherd France.

“A small justice victory for me, a major justice victory for the whale,” he added.

Denmark does not have an extradition treaty with Japan, where Watson’s foundation said he could have faced a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison, and the Danish government declined to extradite him to Japan.

At the time of his release, the Danish Justice Ministry said it had not received adequate guarantees from Japanese authorities that the time Watson had already served in custody would be counted against any sentence he would receive in Japan.

In a statement, Interpol said the decision to remove Watson from the “red notice” list did not reflect any judgment on the merits of the case in Japan, but that it did take into account Denmark’s refusal to extradite him.

“This is not a judgement on the merits of the case, or the events that occurred in 2010,” the Interpol statement said.

The police agency said the decision was made by an independent body, the Commission for the Control of Interpol’s File, which is tasked to ensure that the police body’s processing of personal data adheres to its internal rules.

The decision said Japan had “vigorously engaged” with the commission during the review, which “may be demonstrative of the existence of political elements around the case.” The decision noted that other countries, aside from Denmark, had refused to extradite Watson.

Watson, after his release in December, told the AP that he was planning to travel to Interpol to make his case in person.

The move means that data about Watson held by Interpol will be deleted from its extensive databases, which track some of the world’s most-wanted criminals and violent extremists.

Willam Julie, a Paris-based lawyer for Watson, said the commission recognized the “disproportionate nature of the charges” and “the considerable passage of time” since the incident with the whaling research ship.

In a phone interview, Julie said he had informed Watson about the decision, and his response was: “He’s relieved … He had to be resilient like he always is. He’s happy we won.”

Lamya Essemlali, president of Sea Shepherd France, hailed the “good news that this notice was finally cancelled,” but she noted that Watson still could be arrested and sent to Japan for prosecution.

“It does not give Paul Watson his freedom of movements because the Japanese arrest warrant is sufficient for a country to order his arrest,″ she said.

___

Keaten reported from Geneva.

A new book argues against human exceptionalism about what animals truly feel.

Updated August 23, 2025 |  Reviewed by Margaret Foley

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• https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/202508/why-animal-sentience-must-be-used-to-reform-constitutions
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Key points

• This book breaks new ground by challenging the human-centeredness of constitutional theory.
• Constitutions must respect animals’ intrinsic value to protect their bodily integrity and liberty.
• Sentient beings governed by a constitution need to be granted an equal right to democratic participation.

Source: Ishara Kasthuriarachchi/Pexels

A large body of scientific evidence stemming from studies of diverse species clearly shows that many nonhuman animals (animals) are sentient beings.¹ Because these studies show that the biodiversity of sentience is large and growing, in their new book Animals and the Constitution: Towards Sentience-Based Constitutionalism, Drs. John Olusegun Adenitire and Raffael Fasel wonder why animals are excluded from enjoying constitutional rights and protection. Here’s what Raffael had to say about their very important, challenging, and forward-looking book.

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write Animals and the Constitution: Towards Sentience-Based Constitutionalism?

Raffael Fasel: The seed for this co-authored book was planted when my co-author John Olusegun Adenitire and I started discussing our respective Ph.D. projects at the University of Cambridge―animal rights and human rights in my case, and constitutional law and freedom of religion in his. As we were immersing ourselves in the existing literatures in our fields, we soon noticed a gap in the constitutional theory literature. While political philosophy and ethics had their ‘animal turn’ decades ago, constitutional theory and constitutional law more broadly are still firmly anthropocentric. Our book aims to fill this gap by making the case for a more capacious understanding of constitutionalism based on sentience and by reimagining what democracy, the rule of law, and other central constitutional principles would look like if they catered to the interests of all sentient animals.

MB: Is this book a one-off collaboration for you, or does it reflect your research interests more broadly?

RF: The book represents my wider interest in exploring the intersection of constitutional law and animal law, and it ties in to previous work of mine on the relationship between human and animal rights. Constitutions are at the top of the legal hierarchy―or, as my co-author John likes to put it, they form the very foundation of the legal system. As such, they embody the central values and enshrine the key principles that governments, legislators, and courts need to further in their actions. It is therefore essential to demonstrate how animal law can inform constitutional law―and vice versa―so that animals are given their due.

MB: What is the book’s target audience?

RF: As anyone who reads the book will appreciate, it adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines insights from political philosophy, constitutional law, and human rights practice. Although it might seem a fairly theoretical work, we did our best to present it as accessibly as possible. Hence, it should attract scholars, students, policymakers, and activists alike. Also, because the book does not focus on any one constitution but rather draws on examples from around the world, it should be appealing to an international audience.

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Source: Oxford University Press/Used with permission

MB: Why should constitutions become less anthropocentric in your view?

RF: For a simple reason: Constitutions govern animals’ lives, yet their interests remain largely disregarded. Let me unpack this. Constitutions govern the lives of animals by creating the legal structures that allow treating animals as ownable things that we can use as resources for our own purposes. If constitutions did not permit this―for example, by giving animals certain fundamental rights―then neither state authorities nor private individuals and corporations could use animals in the exploitative ways they do today. What is more, animals are not inanimate entities like buildings, which lack the capacity to care about whether or not they are legally regulated. By contrast, many animals are sentient beings and therefore have inherent value that constitutions need to protect. Our book proposes that constitutions can do so by giving all sentient beings whom they govern due concern. This entails showing respect for animals’ intrinsic value by protecting their basic interests, such as their interest in life, bodily integrity, or liberty.

MB: How do you propose to “reimagine” democracy, the rule of law, and other constitutional concepts?

RF: The book focuses on four pivotal constitutional principles―the rule of law, fundamental rights, proportionality, and democracy―and it rethinks them in a sentience-based way. Let me give you an example: democracy. We argue that all sentient beings governed by a constitution need to be granted an equal right to democratic participation. This does not mean that animals should be granted exactly the same rights as humans. For example, animals would not receive the right to vote or to run for office. However, importantly, they still need to be afforded opportunities to participate in the democratic process on equal terms. To accomplish this, we propose, among other things, to reserve seats in parliaments for sentient beings’ representatives. These representatives would be tasked with representing animals’ interests in the lawmaking process, and they would be elected through special selection assemblies whose members are drawn by lot.

MB: What has been the response of constitutional lawyers and theorists so far? Do they agree that adopting a sentience-based constitution is key to respecting animals?

RF: Having presented our book in a variety of different forums, we have been surprised by the generally very positive response we have received, even from scholars who adopt a more traditional approach to constitutional law. Although some of them took issue with specific aspects of the book, no one challenged the overall argument for sentience-based constitutionalism. In our view, it is impossible for animals to be given the respect they are due as long as constitutions remain centred around humans. Our sense is that more and more people are coming around to this view, too.