Experts Reject Japan's Proposal To Resume Whale Hunting

The International Whaling Committee has rejected Japan's proposal to resume whale hunting on the grounds that it did not offer scientific justification for slaughter, reports The Guardian.

Japanese officials have reportedly been working on a revised motion since last year, when the UN's International Court of Justice ordered an immediate halt to the Japanese whale hunting program.

At the time, conservationists argued that the country's whaling research was simply a cover for commercial whaling.

The whaling program submitted by Japan indicated that whale hunting would help calculate the size of populations necessary to resume sustainable commercial hunting and better understand the Antarctic marine ecosystem — but the IWC did not agree.

"With the information presented in the proposal, the panel was not able to determine whether lethal sampling is necessary to achieve the two major objectives," the IWC wrote in a report. "Therefore the current proposal does not demonstrate the need for lethal sampling to achieve those objectives."