Global conservation group to launch latest anti-whaling effort from Australia

MELBOURNE - The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society's brand new ship will launch its first anti-whaling campaign from Australia.

The Ocean Warrior, a custom-built, $9 million "warship without guns", is on its way to Australia where it will dock at Fremantle, Hobart or Melbourne to prepare to disrupt Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean.

The vessel, which is Sea Shepherd's first brand new ship, sacrificed a vast majority of its storage space to accommodate bigger engines and long-range fuel tanks.

Peter Hammarstedt, a Sea Shepherd member, said the new ship would not be bullied by Japanese whaling ships which were able to ram the older vessels used by the society.

"Our biggest challenge in our campaigns in the past has been that the Japanese whaling vessels have rammed us with their superior size, and they have outrun us with their superior speed," Hammarstedt told Fairfax Media on Wednesday.

"So this is a vessel they cannot catch."

Japanese whalers killed 333 minke whales, 200 of which were pregnant, in Antarctic waters in summer 2015, the first whaling expedition since the International Court of Justice declared the practice illegal in 2014.

Japan has since excused itself from the court's jurisdiction, instead creating new rules for whaling that doubled the size of hunting grounds in the Southern Ocean.

Australia was one of 95 countries to condemn Japan's continued whaling at the World Conservation Congress in Hawaii in September.

"Accountability is important," Hammarstedt said. "The way that we see it is that the international community has now had two years to ensure that Japan complies with the law. They haven't done so.

"Our position is that the international community has failed the whales, so that gives us no other option than to head down (to the Southern Ocean)."