Watson accuses feds of withholding evidence in sealing case

Last Updated: Monday, April 27, 2009
The Canadian Press

The Canadian government is withholding key pieces of evidence in an East
Coast anti-sealing case that is scheduled to go to trial on Monday, an
environmental activist says.

Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society said the Fisheries
Department seized the log books and global positioning system from the
Farley Mowat, the 54-metre vessel at the centre of a high-seas tussle with
the coast guard a year ago.

Watson, the militant group's founder, said Fisheries officials took the
ship's record books when it seized the protest vessel and charged the two
crew with coming too close to the seal hunt without a proper permit.

Watson said the seizure has deprived the two crewmen of their ability to
defend themselves since they can't prove their contention that they were
beyond the federal government's reach because they didn't enter Canadian
waters.

"Our GPS has all of the co-ordinates to prove absolutely that we never
entered Canadian waters," he said last week from Hawaii where he was giving
a speech.

"It's a joke. It's the old Napoleonic code of you're guilty until you're
proven innocent and they have no intention of proving anyone innocent."

Watson also said the crewmen, Captain Alexander Cornelissen of the
Netherlands and first mate Peter Hammarstedt of Stockholm, have been told by
the Immigration Department that because they were deported they're not
allowed to enter Canada, even though they're facing trial.

It's not clear whether they would appear Monday or how the trial would
proceed if they fail to show up since Watson said they are defending
themselves.

Immigration and fisheries officials did not return calls about the case.

The two men were charged last year with violating the Fisheries Act by
navigating the ship within 900 metres of working seal hunters. That's an
offence under federal regulations unless an observer's permit has been
granted. The Mowat did not have one.

The captain was also charged with obstructing a fisheries officer. They both
pleaded not guilty at an earlier hearing and could face a fine of up to
$100,000 if convicted.

Both Watson and Farley Mowat, a Canadian literary icon and the vessel's
namesake, insist the seizure and arrests were illegal since the ship is
Dutch-registered and was outside Canada's 12-mile territorial limit.

Then fisheries minister Loyola Hearn said the Mowat came within nine metres
of a group sealers at one point on March 30, 2008, shattering floes as
sealers scrambled to get back to their small boat. Maritime law experts have
said that Fisheries was within its right to arrest the ship and its crew if
they were indeed violating seal hunt regulations since Canada has
jurisdiction over fish and marine mammals out to 200 nautical miles.

Cornelissen wouldn't say whether he planned to travel to Cape Breton from
his home in Ecuador to face the charges, but claimed he would continue his
opposition to the annual hunt.

"We do intend to fight the Orwellian dictates of the Federal Department of
Fisheries and we are also trying to pass the obstacles that the Canadian
government is placing in our way to prevent a fair hearing," he said in an
email.

"Despite deportation orders and possible verdicts, we have every intention
of coming back over and over again until this massacre stops."

Paula Taylor, senior counsel with the Public Prosecution Service in Halifax,
wouldn't comment on the matter but said cases can proceed without the
accused as long as they have been properly served.

She also said there are provisions in the Criminal Code that allow someone
to access material being held, but it wasn't clear whether the crew tried to
obtain their log books.

The seizure of Mowat followed tense confrontations on the ice floes between
its 17 crew members and the coast guard.

The coast guard said the icebreaker Des Groseilliers was "grazed" twice by
the Farley Mowat about 60 kilometres north of Cape Breton as the protest
ship closed in on some seal hunters.

But Watson dismissed the charge, saying its much smaller ship was struck
twice by the 98-metre icebreaker.

Weeks later, black-clad Mounties brandishing submachine-guns boarded the
Mowat and arrested all crew members, who said they were forced to lay down
on the deck of the ship while some were handcuffed.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/newfoundland-labrador/story/2009/04/27/cp-watson-se
aling-428.html