GENEVA (Kyodo) -- Activist Paul Watson has revealed a plan to take action against Iceland's whaling activities in June, while continuing to monitor whether Japanese ships return to the Southern Ocean to hunt the marine mammal in the area.

Speaking in a recent online interview with Kyodo News, the longtime environmental activist originally from Canada demanded Interpol retract a decision to put him on its wanted list for his alleged interference with a Japanese whaling boat 15 years ago, saying he has done nothing wrong.

"Our ongoing campaign is to stop illegal whaling activities this summer. We will be intervening against Icelandic whaling. That'll start in June," said Watson, 74.

"If Japan returns to the Southern Ocean in the fall, we will be there to meet them," he said, mentioning his group's readiness to deploy a ship standing by in Australia to protect the whale sanctuary near Antarctica.

Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, left in 2022 to launch the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, through which his current campaigns to stop whaling are organized.

Japan withdrew from the International Whaling Commission in 2019, suspending whaling in the area near Antarctica and resuming the hunt in waters much closer to the country.

In July last year, Watson was detained in Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, while en route to intercept a Japanese whaling ship.

Japanese authorities obtained an arrest warrant for him in 2010 on suspicion of having conspired to forcibly obstruct the country's whaling in the sea near Antarctica the same year. Interpol later put him on its wanted list, issuing a red notice.

Denmark chose not to extradite him to Japan and released him in December after taking him into custody for five months. He currently lives in France, an anti-whaling country, as an honorary citizen of Paris.

Watson, who holds Canadian and U.S. citizenship, said he received some 6,000 letters during his detention, including "quite a few" from Japan.

"People weren't really supporting me as an individual. They were supporting the cause that I stand for, the protection of whales and the protection of the ocean," he said.

"I think I'm the only person in history to be put on the Interpol red notice for the conspiracy to trespass and to obstruct business," Watson said, adding he "didn't injure anybody and didn't damage any property."

According to Interpol, a red notice is a request for law enforcement worldwide to locate and temporarily arrest a person pending extradition or legal action. Unlike an international arrest warrant, each country involved decides whether to act on it based on its own laws.

Watson was invited to a film festival on human rights in Geneva this month, but he did not come to Switzerland as he "couldn't get anything in writing from the Swiss authorities saying that I would not be detained."

Watson said he will speak at the U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice in June.

(By Maeva Chabrier)