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U.N., U.S. To Take Action Against Greenpeace
Wednesday, November 19, 2003

The prominent environmental nongovernmental organization Greenpeace has come under attack from the International Maritime Organization and the U.S. government for allegedly overstepping its role in publicizing environmental abuses at sea.

The IMO is claiming that some Greenpeace activities violated regulations designed to ensure safety at sea. It argues that ships and crew members have been endangered when Greenpeace activists shadowed or boarded vessels to protest substandard tankers and shipments of nuclear material and genetically modified organisms.

The U.N. agency may revoke Greenpeace's "consultative status," which it has held for 12 years and which permits the environmental group to make and critique recommendations to the IMO. The IMO assembly is scheduled to make a decision on Greenpeace's status when it meets Nov. 24 to Dec. 5.

The environmental group says safety has always been paramount in its operations and that all of its activists are properly trained.

Greenpeace also says the IMO has never revoked consultative status from any other observer, including lobbyists for supertanker companies, despite the "unsafe seamanship" practiced by some of those companies, and which resulted in the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska and the Prestige spill near the Spanish coast last year.

"Unlike the oil industry, we don't put other people's lives or the environment at risk with our actions," Greenpeace said. "The reality is that our activities have upset some members of the shipping industry - those which are involved in environmentally damaging activities."

In Washington, meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department is filing charges against Greenpeace for allegedly violating an 1872 law, reportedly invoked twice in its 131-year history, created to keep bar and brothel owners from luring sailors to their establishments.

The Justice Department has accused Greenpeace of violating the law when, in 1992, two activists followed and then boarded a vessel allegedly transporting illegal mahogany as it approached the port of Miami. The U.S. government is encouraging local authorities to revoke Greenpeace's docking rights. If convicted, the group could lose its tax-exempt status.

Greenpeace U.S.A. Director John Passacantando called the prosecution "unprecedented in American history. Never before has our government criminally prosecuted an entire organization for free speech activities of its supporters."

The actions against Greenpeace come amid efforts by conservative groups in the United States to more closely track the activities of progressive international nongovernmental organizations, OneWorld.net reported.

"There is this falsehood that they are somehow from the grassroots," said Danielle Pletka, vice-president of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "That is an untruth" (OneWorld.net/China Daily, Nov. 19).