Iceland to deport antiwhaling protest ship’s crew after they interfered with whale hunt

Authorities in Iceland detained the M/V Bandero, an antiwhaling protest ship, on July 30 and held the boat in port in Reykjavík with its 21-person crew detained on board, according to Manolya Adan, an environmental biologist who was among the crew. She spoke to Mongabay on Aug. 4 from the ship and communicated further via text message over the next few days.

The vessel is operated by the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, a “direct action” ocean conservation nonprofit that operates globally (but maintains a P.O. box in New York City). It flies the Panamanian flag.

According to the foundation, the M/V Bandero had been at sea for more than a month monitoring whaling activities by Hvalur hf., the country’s last whaling company, which is owned by Kristján Loftsson.

The ship had purportedly been required to report its position hourly to the Icelandic Coast Guard, broadcast AIS and were under constant surveillance, monitored by plane and drones.

The vessel entered into Iceland’s 12-nautical-mile national waters on July 30 after the crew identified that the Hvalur 9, one of the country’s last whaling ships, was leaving harbor. The Hvalur 9 returned to port without hunting as the M/V Bandero approached.

The Coast Guard then deployed a helicopter and pursued the M/V Bandero with patrol vessels, eventually boarding the ship with armed forces. Adan said the vessel was boarded just before midnight on July 30 in Iceland’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), an area that extends 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) from the country’s coast. The ship was on its way into international waters at the time, she said, about 10 minutes from exiting the EEZ.

The Icelandic Coast Guard said the crew of the Hvalur 9 “requested assistance on Thursday evening [July 30] because they believed their safety was under threat” from the Bandero, according to the Associated Press. In a video posted to Instagram on July 31, founder and director Paul Watson said the foundation had “successfully aborted a whaling mission” by the Hvalur 9 and “forced it back to its processing plant.”

Iceland ordered the crew’s deportation and temporarily banned them from reentering the country, Icelandic police said. They were initially held onboard; eventually allowed to leave the ship but had to remain in contact with authorities in Reykjavík. So far, after Aug.7 hearings, five American crewmembers were deported.

The clash comes after Hvalur hf.  resumed hunting fin whales earlier this year following a two-year pause. The company has killed more than 1,000 fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) since 2009, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) said in June, including 148 in 2022 and 24 in 2023.

Before this current, incident, the M/V Bandero had purportedly been required to report its position hourly to the Icelandic Coast Guard, broadcast AIS and were under constant surveillance, monitored by plane and drones. However, the harpoon whaling ships allegedly had not used AIS since 2015.

The company  had purportedly killed about 30 whales in the current season by the time the Bandero was detained, according to Adan, which she called “a massacre.”

Conflict on the waves

A press release posted to the foundation’s website on Aug. 2, said only the ship’s captain had been formally charged, though it did not specify with what.

All crew members were served notice of a decision on expulsion and a minimum two-year reentry ban, the Icelandic police said in a statement on their website dated Aug. 4. The ban covers the entire Schengen area for non-European Economic Area nationals, but is limited to Iceland for EEA citizens.

Crew members can appeal these decisions to the Immigration Appeals Board, the police said in a second statement, dated the same day, but an appeal does not suspend enforcement of the decisions. The expulsion process could take anywhere from a few days to several weeks, the statement said.

“The crew members have been permitted to leave the ship and are currently responsible for themselves,” the statement added. “They have reporting obligation with the police and are required to remain within the Capital Area until their expulsion has been carried out.”

Adan wrote in a text message that the crew’s legal team was contesting the two-year ban.

Earlier this year, the M/V Bandero was involved in a collision off Antarctica with a Norwegian krill trawler operated by Aker QRILL Company, as reported by the Associated Press.

In this current incident, authorities questioned crew members and confiscated their phones and personal property, Adan said. The crew was also facing sanitation issues aboard the boat, she said on Aug. 4.

At one point, three crew members were brought to a police station for questioning, where they were stripped down to their underwear and made to wait that way for hours, Adan said.

The Coast Guard officers, however, were generally “kind and respectful,” Adan said, adding that “they were just doing their jobs, and they were doing it in the best way that they possibly could.”

On an institutional level, Adan pointed t0 what she said was “a very, very obvious influence from Kristján Loftsson here,” calling out the Hvalur CEO.

“I think the general sentiment of the crew is that we’re just incredibly frustrated to be sitting here whilst the whales are being murdered,” Adan said on Aug. 4. “And he’s got free rein now. There’s no one keeping him in balance, and we’re just really, really scared to see what he’s going to do whilst we’re sitting here detained.”

Hvalur hf. did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

An international debate

Hvalur hf. hunts fin whales, some of the largest animals in the world. The species is classified as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, with an estimated 100,000 mature individuals remaining across the globe. It lives primarily in temperate and subpolar regions.

The Captain Paul Watson Foundation, founded in 1977 by the eponymous conservationist, has the stated mission of defending marine life and protecting oceans through what its website calls “a unique strategy of aggressive non-violence and intervention against illegal operations exploiting life in the sea.”

The current confrontation was part of a larger protest against Icelandic whaling called Operation 86.

Iceland’s government announced announced plans to review the country’s whaling policy later this year, according to IFAW, “with the stated goal of ultimately ending whaling in the country.”

“However, any meaningful changes may not take effect until the current five-year license expires in 2029, leaving uncertainty over how quickly reforms can be implemented,” IFAW wrote on its website in June.

“Iceland has consistently advocated [for] sustainable utilization of living marine resource[s] and, with regard to whaling, maintains a science-based and strictly regulated approach,” Dúi Jóhannsson Landmark, head of communications for the Iceland Ministry of Industries, told Mongabay in an email.

“The existing legal framework remains in force under the Whaling Act No. 26/1949 and the regulations issued thereunder,” he wrote. “The total permitted catch is set in accordance with the advice of the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute and has been reduced for 2026 compared to previous years.”

Industries Minister Hanna Katrín Friðriksson has commissioned a comprehensive review of the legislative framework, he added. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) developed a scientifically vetted algorithm to produce quotas for those countries that still hunt whales commercially, said Chris Wold, a law professor at Lewis & Clark College in the U.S. and a member of the IWC working group on operational effectiveness. These quotas are used to ensure whales aren’t overharvested, he said.

Wold said he anticipates Iceland will bring up the actions of the Captain Paul Watson Foundation at the next meeting of the IWC in late September and added he believes this will pull the conversation away from the quotas.

“Now we won’t be talking about that — we’ll be talking about what Paul Watson has been doing,” Wold said.

“These kinds of issues are, for me, a total distraction,” he added, “that take away from key issues that we need to address, like entanglement of cetaceans in fishing gear — which is far more, on a global scale, problematic for cetaceans than directed killing.”

Banner image: Whale slaughtering in Hvalfjörður, Iceland, July 2009. Image by Dagur Brynjólfsson via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Iceland plans to resume whale hunting this summer

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Cite this article

Alex Megerle (2026). Iceland to deport antiwhaling protest ship’s crew after they interfered with whale hunt. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-325958