International Whaling Commission

Assembled from 18 blocks · 3 evidence · 12 related

1. Story
2. The body established under the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, signed in 1946, that sets catch limits through amendments to its Schedule. Its record on blue whales is the whole ambiguity of the institution: it presided over the largest removal of the species while it was setting quotas, then protected blue whales from hunting from 1966, adopted the commercial moratorium in 1982 and the Southern Ocean Sanctuary in 1994. It also relied on catch returns filed by member states, which in the Soviet case were false. It is a regulator whose data came from the regulated.
3. Knowledge
4. International Whaling Commission
5. Connections
6. Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary
7. IWC Southern Ocean Research Partnership
8. The International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling is signed
9. Soviet fleets take protected whales and file false returns
10. The IWC protects blue whales from commercial hunting
11. The IWC adopts the commercial whaling moratorium
12. The commercial whaling moratorium takes effect
13. The Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary is adopted
14. The true scale of Soviet whaling is published
15. Evidence
16. Blue whales have been protected from hunting by the IWC since 1966; the commercial moratorium was adopted in 1982 with effect from the 1985/86 pelagic and 1986 coastal seasons via paragraph 10(e) of the Schedule; Antarctic blue whale abundance remains below one percent of pre-whaling size. V55 verification basis: iwc.int is blocked by this environment's egress proxy and could not be fetched; these statements come from search summaries that attribute them to the IWC and from concurring secondary sources. One summary refers to a 1964 zero-catch measure whose scope could not be confirmed.
17. The Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary was established by the IWC in 1994, with 23 states in favour and Japan opposed, covering about 50 million square kilometres around Antarctica; its northern boundary follows 40°S except in the Indian Ocean sector, where it meets the Indian Ocean Whale Sanctuary at 55°S, and around South America and into the South Pacific, where it is at 60°S. Its status is reviewed every ten years. V55 verification basis: iwc.int is blocked by this environment's egress proxy; the boundary description comes from search summaries and reference works, not from the IWC Schedule text.
18. The USSR conducted illegal whaling from 1948, fleets keeping a falsified return for the IWC alongside a true internal record; Yablokov published the first account of the real scale in 1994, indicating roughly 330,000 whales killed in the Southern Ocean against about 185,000 reported. Protected blue whales were taken; the reconstructed number is given inconsistently across accounts, from one or two thousand to more than three thousand. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary attributed to this literature; no catch-data paper was fetched and no single blue whale total is asserted.