Banning Whaling
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Resolution Text
| Category: | Environmental | Industry Affected: | All Businesses | Proposed By: | Konigreich_der_Nacht |
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Description:
Recognising that:
- Overfishing is a serious problem which is depleting the marine environment by upsetting its natural ecosystem.
- Whales are a highly-developed mammal with advanced social and communications systems.
- Whales already face many threats including entanglement in fishing nets, noise disturbance and pollution.
- Whaling has already driven the world's whale population to the brink of extinction before the present moratorium was put in place.
- The current motorised harpoon method of killing whales is barbarous, causing a slow and agonising death to the creature involved.
- There is little that can now be learned from 'scientific whaling'. Scientific enquiry can take place without the need for slaughtering its subjects.
- A voluntary moratorium on whaling is not working. Pro-whaling nations will simply subvert it for their own ends by vote-buying or by abusing so-called 'scientific whaling'.
Proposing that:
- Unlicenced scientific and all commercial whaling are outlawed in international law. Nations that flout this ban are subject to economic sanctions and whalers' boats can be impounded and destroyed.
- A commission is set up by the United Nations to study the effects of overfishing and on other human activities on the marine ecosystem, and to propose solutions. If it sees a genuine need for scientific whaling, then it is empowered to licence limited scientific whaling.
- Indigenous peoples who engage in 'aboriginal whaling' using traditional non-industrial methods and taking only a small number of whales each year, to be exempt from the ban. A register of such peoples to be set up by the UN.
- Votes For: 12,385
- Votes Against: 3,684
- Implemented: Mon Aug 23 2004
