Irish commissioner and former IWC chairman Michael Canney does not believe it should be possible to join the IWC with a reservation. "A convention is there. You join or you don't join," he says to the Harpoon. "You can't pick the bits you like and leave out the bits you don't like."

And yet the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species specifically allows countries to join with reservations.

"The whaling convention makes no provisions on reservations to the treaty, but this only means that reservations are not excluded," states William Burke, Professor Emeritus of International Law at the University of Washington, to the Harpoon.

Source: The International Harpoon - The Paper With a Point, High North Alliance, 23 July, 2001 (In press).