In despair, Paul Watson let out a short, stifled laugh. On Wednesday, October 23, in a courtroom in Nuuk, the capital of the Danish autonomous territory, the famous 73-year-old activist just learned that he will have to remain in the Greenlandic city's prison until November 13 – at least. During these three additional weeks, which come on top of four months already spent in detention, the Danish Ministry of Justice continues to study the extradition request from Japan, at the origin of the international arrest warrant for the activist. On July 21, he was arrested during a brief stopover in Greenland to refuel his boat, the John Paul DeJoria.
As a snowstorm darkened the city, in the courtroom, hands folded and a sad look on his face, the founder of Sea Shepherd sat facing Mariam Khalil, the Nuuk prosecutor. As in the last three hearings on his legal situation, held every month or so, she revisited the NGO's operation against a Japanese whaler in 2010, during which Watson was accused of committing damage and participating in the "injury" of a sailor, targeted by a stink bomb. To justify his continued detention, Khalil compared his case to a local case from 2017, in which a teenager fired live ammunition at a building and in the direction of several people, without hitting them.
When the 73-year-old was annoyed by this comparison, Finn Meinel, his lawyer, put his hand on his arm and said it was "shameful comparing the two." Before a short deliberation, lasting no more than ten minutes, Watson addressed the court: He questioned the court's objective before denouncing a "politically-charged case" imposed by the Japanese whaling industry, a "criminal organization."
Deprived of the sea, Watson is moving heaven and earth to obtain his release. On Wednesday, October 16, the activist asked France for political asylum in a letter sent to Emmanuel Macron. In it, he thanked the French president for his "support" and mentioned his admiration for the author Jules Verne and Commander Jacques-Yves Cousteau, whom he met in 1986 during the World Expo in Vancouver, Canada. "I want France to be our home," said Watson, who Le Monde met on Tuesday, October 22, in a cell set aside for visits to the Nuuk prison, isolated along a fjord.
For the past two years, the founder of Sea Shepherd has divided his time between Marseille, where his wife Yana Rusinovich lives with their two young children, Tiger and Murtagh, and a barge docked near the Pont des Arts. For the moment, the French government's response has been coy: spokesperson Maud Bregeon said in the wake of the request that the question of granting Watson French citizenship had not yet been "decided." Questioned on radio station France Inter on October 18, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot replied with a procedural point, specifying that it would be necessary to be "on the soil of the country" to submit such a request.
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