Can Australia police the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary?Animal Planet presents this feature as a conversation with legal scholars. We draw no conclusions, other than that reasonable legal minds differ on these issues.
  DR. CHARLOTTE EPSTEIN: "So there are two kinds of whale sanctuaries. There's a sanctuary that a country can declare over its waters, alright. So a country like Mexico has a sanctuary. Australia has declared all its territorial waters to be a whale sanctuary. That's one thing. That's a country sanctuary. That's different from the whale sanctuaries that have been accepted by the IWC — [...] that's where specific whale sanctuaries have been declared in common by the countries coming together. And specifically, there's one in the Southern Oceans that was [...] established in 1994.
"So Australia has declared its waters to be whale sanctuaries, and they are actually enforcing it quite seriously. [But] in these international waters, including in the international Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary — the sanctuary proclaimed by the IWC — Australia does not have enforcement powers. That's an important difference. It can do what it wants in its own waters, [but] not in international waters."
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