Norway walks out over demand to end whaling

Norway's delegation walked out of the International Whaling Commission meeting in Aberdeen yesterday when a motion demanding that it cease commercial whaling immediately was debated.

"We wanted to put down a marker," said the country's commissioner to the IWC, Kare Bryn, after leading the walk out of his delegation. "We're annoyed at the practice of making these 'We hate Norway' resolutions."

Norway defies the IWC's moratorium on commercial whaling, which came into effect 10 years ago. It used its right under international law to make a formal objection, and this summer 31 boats harpooned about 400 minke whales in the north-east Atlantic.

Britain, France and the US wrote yesterday's critical resolution. It was passed with 18 votes in favour and seven against. Mr Bryn left one member of his delegation in the meeting room to vote against the resolution. Afterwards, he made it clear that Norway would ignore the vote, carry on whaling but remain within the IWC.

"There is a debate in Norway about whether we should pull out of the IWC," he said. But the commission was founded 50 years ago to promote the rational exploitation of whale stocks, and Norway was determined to bring it back to its true purpose.

Mr Bryn said that despite his walk-out, Norway had found the Aberdeen meeting the most constructive it had attended in more than a decade. The IWC had accepted an estimate of 118,000 minke whales in the north- east Atlantic - far more than had previously been thought.

Norway says this is a healthy, growing and unendangered population and its hunting quota poses no threat to it.

The meeting also passed a vote condemning Japan's "scientific" whaling, which killed 540 minkes, the smallest of the great whales, in the Antarctic and north Pacific in the past year.

Japan formally adheres to the moratorium, but exploits a loophole which allows whales to be killed for scientific research. The meat ends up being traded and eaten in Japan.

Since the late 1970s a majority of IWC member states have been anti- whaling.

James Martin Jones of the World Wide Fund for Nature said: "We are more and more worried at the way in which Japan and Norway are getting round the moratorium and killing an increasing number of whales."

The whaling ambitions of a tribe of North American Indians also suffered a setback yesterday, when the Makah from Washington State shelved its request to catch five Pacific grey whales a year.