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review the entirety of JARPA’s data and results and to assess the extent to which JARPA had
accomplished or made progress towards its stated objectives; several recommendations were made
for the further study and analysis of the data collected under JARPA. Japan submitted its Research
Plan for JARPA II to the IWC in March 2005, and launched JARPA II, in November 2005, after
the January 2005 meeting convened by Japan but prior to the December 2006 final review of
JARPA by the Scientific Committee.
106. Australia describes the “primary purpose” of JARPA as the estimation of the natural
mortality rate of Antarctic minke whales (i.e., the chance that a whale will die from natural causes
in any particular year). Australia also maintains that Japan purported to be collecting biological
data that it viewed as relevant to the New Management Procedure (the “NMP”) the model in use
by the Commission to regulate whaling activity at the time of JARPA’s launch but abandoned
its initial approach after five years. According to Australia, the goal to estimate natural mortality
was “practically unachievable” and the “irrelevance” of JARPA was confirmed in 1994 when the
Commission agreed to replace the NMP with another management tool, the Revised Management
Procedure (the “RMP”), which did not require the type of information that JARPA obtained by
lethal sampling.
107. The RMP requires a brief explanation. The Parties agree that the RMP is a conservative
and precautionary management tool and that it remains the applicable management procedure of
the IWC, although its implementation has not been completed. Australia maintains that the RMP
“overcomes the difficulties faced by the NMP” the mechanism that the Commission previously
developed to set catch limits because it takes uncertainty in abundance estimates into account
and “does not rely on biological parameters that are difficult to estimate”. Japan disputes this
characterization of the RMP and argues that its implementation requires “a huge amount of
scientific data” at each step. Thus, the Parties disagree on whether data collected by JARPA and
JARPA II contribute to the RMP.
108. With regard to JARPA, Australia asserts that the Scientific Committee was unable to
conclude at the final review workshop held in 2006 that any of JARPA’s stated objectives had been
met, including an adequately precise estimate of natural mortality rate. Japan maintains that
recommendations made in the course of JARPA’s final review led to further analysis of the JARPA
data and that in 2010 the Scientific Committee accepted an estimate of natural mortality rate based
on those data. Overall, the Parties disagree whether JARPA made a scientific contribution to the
conservation and management of whales. The Court is not called upon to address that
disagreement.