Iceland Seizes Paul Watson Group's Protest Ship, Detains 21 Crew After Whaler's Distress Call

Icelandic authorities seized a protest ship tied to anti-whaling activist Paul Watson and detained its entire 21-member crew, officials announced Saturday, in one of the more dramatic confrontations yet between whalers and the movement Watson built over five decades.

The Icelandic Coast Guard said the trouble started Thursday evening when the crew of the whaling vessel Hvalur 9 called for help, saying they felt their safety was threatened by the protest ship Bandero, operated by the Captain Paul Watson Foundation. The Coast Guard says Bandero ignored orders to leave Icelandic waters and later ignored an order to cut its engines.

Around midnight Thursday, Coast Guard personnel and the Viking Squad, Iceland's police special forces unit, boarded Bandero and took the crew into custody. Watson himself was not on board, according to the Coast Guard, AP News, and the New York Post.

The Captain Paul Watson Foundation confirmed the seizure in a statement, saying its 21 crew members were being detained aboard the ship without access to their phones. Bandero arrived in Reykjavik on Friday, where Icelandic police took over the investigation from the Coast Guard.

Icelandic national broadcaster RUV reported that police intend to seek deportation of the crew and a ban on their return to Iceland. No criminal charges have been announced as of Saturday, and the sources reviewed do not indicate any court proceeding has begun.

A Legal Hunt, A Shrinking Industry

Iceland, along with Norway and Japan, is one of the last countries still practicing commercial whaling. Icelandic authorities set annual quotas for fin whales and minke whales that licensed fishermen are permitted to hunt in the country's waters.

Most of Iceland's whale meat gets exported to Japan. But demand there has been falling since Japan left the International Whaling Commission and resumed its own commercial whaling operations in 2019. Domestically, whale meat is now rarely eaten in Iceland, and the hunt has become increasingly controversial even among Icelanders, according to AP News and Newsday.

Iceland's whaling is legal under its own law and quota system. Watson's foundation views it as morally indefensible regardless of legality, and its tactics, blocking, shadowing, and physically confronting whaling vessels at sea, are designed to make the hunt as costly and dangerous as possible for the crews carrying it out.

The whalers' side of this is straightforward: they were operating a legal commercial activity and called for help when they felt endangered by a vessel that refused repeated orders to leave the area and stop its engines. Coast guard intervention followed a direct distress call, not a unilateral crackdown on protesters.

Watson's History With Icelandic and International Law

Watson, 75, born in Canada, co-founded Greenpeace before leading the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society for decades, where his group's high-seas confrontations with whaling ships drew celebrity support and were chronicled on the reality series "Whale Wars." He left Sea Shepherd in 2022 to launch his own foundation.

He was imprisoned in Greenland for five months in 2024 after Japan issued a warrant for his arrest tied to a 2010 incident involving obstruction of a whaling vessel. Upon his release in December 2024, Watson said he'd be more careful about which countries he entered.

"I have to make sure that I don't land in Iceland or another country where Interpol might try to have me arrested again," Watson said at the time, according to Newsday and Yahoo News NZ.

Interpol placed Watson on a "red notice" in 2012 at Japan's request. He was removed from Interpol's most-wanted list in 2025, according to Newsday.

Watson's confrontational approach has also fractured the anti-whaling movement itself. Some maritime firms have accused his activists of endangering vessels and crews rather than protecting whales. Earlier this year, Bandero collided with an industrial krill trawler in Antarctica, an incident the trawler's Norwegian owner described as a deliberate attack that put its crew at risk and could have triggered an environmental disaster, according to Newsday and Yahoo News NZ. Watson's foundation's account of that Antarctic collision was not included in the available reporting.

What Happens Next

Icelandic police have not announced charges against the 21 detained crew members. RUV reports police are pursuing deportation and a re-entry ban rather than criminal prosecution, though that process has not concluded.

Whether Watson himself faces any legal exposure from this incident remains unclear, since he wasn't aboard the vessel. The bigger open question is whether Iceland's move signals a harder line against foreign protest vessels entering its waters during future hunting seasons, or whether this is a one-off response to a specific distress call and standoff.