KEY POINTS:
The international whaling body could be in for a shake-up with a special meeting to be held in London later this week.
Conservation minister Steve Chadwick said Japan needed to be kept at the table but the International Whaling Commission had to be reformed.
"Roughly half of the 77 members of the IWC are against whaling, and half are for whaling. As a result, it is dysfunctional and its progress is limited.
"The future of the IWC relies on breaking this deadlock and urgently agreeing a new approach ahead of the annual meeting being attended by all countries in June in Chile," Ms Chadwick said.
Greenpeace executive director Bunny McDiarmid said Greenpeace was supporting the move and would be sending their own delegation to the meeting.
She said the IWC needed to be dragged into the Twenty-first Century.
"The meeting will see if we can break down the walls built up by both sides," Ms McDiarmid said.
She said Japan could threaten to pull out of the IWC if it didn't get its way but that there would be nothing new in that.
"There isn't really anywhere else they can go. Japan likes to be part of the international legal structure and I'm not sure that they'll follow through," Ms McDiarmid said.
She said international law governing fishing grounds and oceans had all changed in the sixty years since the IWC was established.
"The IWC is out of date," Ms McDiarmid said.
Japan hunts whales under an IWC clause that allows whales to be killed for scientific research. Commercial whaling has been banned by the IWC since 1986.
Ms Chadwick said New Zealand's Whaling Commissioner Sir Geoffrey Palmer and staff from the Department of Conservation and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would attend this week's meeting.
"New Zealand is strongly opposed to Japan's whaling in the Southern Ocean and totally rejects that lethal whaling is needed for scientific research," Ms Chadwick said.
- NZHERALD STAFF
