Sea Shepherd skirmish could be raised in meeting with Dutch defence minister

Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi will today meet Eimert van Middelkoop, the Netherlands’ defence minister, whose country registers the 59-metre Steve Irwin protest ship, used by the anti-poaching group Sea Shepherd.

The ship was last week involved in skirmishes with tuna ranchers, when it rammed a tuna pen being towed to Maltese shores by the Cesare Rustica and Rosaria Tuna for the Maltese firm Fish And Fish.

The Sea Shepherd’s divers then managed to cut open the cages, releasing some 800 tuna – which they claim were mostly juveniles and illegally captured after the tuna season closed – into the wild, at an estimated cost of €1 million for the fishing company.

The government has written to the Netherlands, which registers the vessels of Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, to probe the incidents and reconsider the vessels' inclusion in the registry. Through a letter sent by Malta's embassy in The Hague, the government said: "Actions taken in the past days under the maritime flag of the Kingdom of the Netherlands were anything but peaceful. The aggression on the property of tuna operators was unprovoked and premeditated."

The Maltese government says the tuna in question was legally caught according to Maltese, European Union and International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas regulations, and was purchased by the farm operators with the consent of
local and foreign authorities. In light of this, it invited the Netherlands to investigate the violent protests and evaluate whether they were in breach of shipping regulations.

By virtue of its registration with the Dutch ship register, the Netherlands has already attempted to deregister the Steve Irwin. Urged on by repeated requests from Japan – the world’s foremost whaling nation, whose vessels the Sea Shepherd society rams to prevent them from capturing whales – the Dutch government has submitted to its legislature a bill that would strip the protest ship owned by Sea Shepherd of its Dutch registration.

The bill, if passed, would revise the country’s ship registry law, enabling the government to revoke the registry of a ship that harmed crew or cargoes of other ships or damaged Holland’s relationship with other countries.

In a paper submitted to the legislature, the Dutch government specifically pointed to Sea Shepherd, whose vessel the Steve Irwin rammed into a whaling ship and threw bottles of chemicals onto it.

In 2008, Japan summoned the Australian and Dutch ambassadors in Tokyo to protest the actions of Sea Shepherd, when it threw bottles of rancid butter – a famed tactic of the anti-poaching group – onto a Japanese whaling ship near Antarctica.