SYDNEY, Oct 4, 2011 (AFP) - Australia renewed calls for Japan to cease its whaling programme Tuesday, urging it to abandon plans to return to Antarctica in the face of "widespread" concern in the global community.
Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said Australia remained "resolute in its opposition to all commercial whaling, including Japan's so-called scientific whaling," and urged its key trading partner to rethink its annual hunt.
"There is widespread concern in the international community at Japan's whaling programme and widespread calls for it to cease," Rudd said, expressing Canberra's "disappointment" that harpooning persisted in the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary.
Japan recalled its Antarctic fleet a month early this February with just one-fifth of its planned catch after dogged harassment by environmental activists from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
But it confirmed in July that it intended to return to the Southern Ocean and remained committed to "research" whaling, despite the anti-whaling group's high-stakes campaign.
Whaling is a thorny diplomatic issue which saw Australia take Japan to the International Court of Justice last year, seeking an end to its harpooning which it conducts under a "scientific" loophole in the 1986 moratorium.
Attorney general Robert McClelland said the case against its traditional ally was not taken lightly, but Australia wanted a permanent end to whaling in the Antarctic and commercial hunting more broadly.
Rudd said: "The government has always been firm in our resolve that if we could not find a diplomatic resolution to our differences over this issue, we would pursue legal action."
"This is the proper way to settle legal differences between friends," he added.
Japan conducts whale hunting in the southern hemisphere for what it describes as "scientific research", setting self-determined quotas averaging about 1,000 whales each year over the past five years.
The killing is permissible under the International Whaling Commission rules, but other nations and environmental groups condemn it as disguised commercial whaling.
