Yesterday, a resolution was passed in the European Parliament welcoming Iceland's application to join the EU. Iceland's application raises some interesting questions, especially in the light of recent divisions within the EU on environmental issues.
On fishing, for example, Iceland famously has control over its own waters, would it be prepared to let other EU vessels have free access? It's gone to (cod) war over the issue before… and then there are whales. In the EU all cetacean species (that's whales, dolphins and porpoises) are protected species under the Habitats Directive. So it's a no brainer that whaling is 'not allowed' in the EU. Moreover, the EU member states take a common position and vote as a bloc when it comes to international bodies like the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and CITES.
Iceland, meanwhile, desperately wants to be part of the EU. Yet this is a country which re-joined the (IWC) taking out a reservation to the commercial whaling moratorium, then proceeded to resurrect its own commercial whaling hunt, based on exporting endangered fin whale meat to Japan (and trampling over both the IWC's commercial whaling ban and CITES ban on trading fin whales in the process).
The good news is that yesterday's resolution included an amendment, tabled by Green MEPs as below:
Insists that Iceland cease all whaling and drops all of the reservations that it has lodged at the International Whaling Commission;
Had this amendment not been tabled, and adopted, then there would have conspicuously been no mention at all of whaling in the EU's resolution. Which seems er, a bit fishy.
But back to the UK. The UK government recently reaffirmed its anti-whaling credentials in advance of the IWC meeting. There was genuine concern that some EU countries wanted to soften the EU's position, just as there were controversial discussions on the future of the IWC taking place. The new minister, Richard Benyon, showed the UK's commitment by attending the IWC meeting, making it clear that the UK was standing firm in its opposition to commercial whaling.
So far, so good.
Why then, did none of the MEPs from either party in the coalition government support the amendment in Europe? All Conservative MEPs abstained, as did most Liberal Democrat MEPs (bizarrely, a few of them even voted against it!).
Is it simply a case of the UK parties having no control over what their MEPs are doing? Or have whales become a negotiable commodity all of a sudden? Maybe there's some quid-pro-krona going on about paying back Iceland's indebted investors, and it's the whales that are going to end up paying out?
If one of the staunchest of anti-whaling nations is wavering on Icelandic whaling, just how stringent will the EU be in Iceland's accession, and just what does that mean for the EU's whaling policy?
