Japan remains the only country denied a quota by the IWC for hunting whales within its own waters. The institutionalized racism that allows the USA to hunt endangered bowhead whales while denying Japan the right to take a smaller number of abundant minke whales amounts to nothing less than victimization. In the IWC, indigenous people in Alaska apparently rank higher on the scale of humanity than Japanese people who share similar cultural and spiritual characteristics. When Japan complained of the double standards last year, it was lambasted by the USA who subsequently manipulated the procedures of the IWC to secure a re-vote on the bowhead quota at the special meeting in Cambridge.

The recent treatment of Iceland defies belief. Its decision to rejoin the IWC was thwarted by unconstitutional maneuverings in London and Shimonoseki, ostensibly because it took a reservation on the moratorium, as it was legally entitled to do. While some member states wanted Iceland to join only without a reservation, they had no authority – legally or morally – to compel it to do so. The IWC had no more authority to vote on Iceland’s membership than United Nations countries do to elect new members. But the anti-whaling majority forced a vote on a Chairman’s ruling, a procedural ploy that allows them to adjudicate on any dispute, and Iceland was duly rejected.

Now it seems that the same tactic might be deployed again at Berlin, with anti-whaling countries preparing to vote Iceland out of the IWC. This would set an interesting precedent in international affairs, opening the door for other bodies to jettison minority groupings. If followed in national politics, governing parties might disenfranchise whole swathes of electors by voting out their representatives in a more newsworthy example of the "tyranny of the majority". What Alexis de Tocqueville would make of the workings of the IWC is anybody’s guess.