According to recent reports, Australia who for many months has been threatening Japan over its annual whaling in the Southern Ocean has finally launched its unprecedented international legal action.

Announcing the legal challenge Environment Minister Peter Garrett said Australia had exhausted all diplomatic avenues to stop Southern Ocean whaling, and had been left with no option but to take legal action in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. A statement from the Japanese embassy in Canberra called the move ''regrettable and not constructive" but will argue in court that its whaling activities in the Southern Ocean are legal under Article 8 of the 1946 Convention on Whaling, which allows countries to kill whales for scientific research. The legal action comes ahead of this year's International Whaling Commission's (IWC) crucial meeting which will debate a deal that could allow Japan limited rights to commercial whaling. If the compromise deal is passed by the IWC, Australia may lose the legal basis for its case.

However not all countries support Australia's views and feel the decision to take Japan to court is an uncertain gamble on whales' lives. If Australia loses, all other anti-whaling countries could lose as well.

Details of Australia's case are being withheld by the government before the lodging of papers at the ICJ in The Hague this week. Australia funded its own non-lethal whale scientific program to demonstrate that whale research can be conducted without killing whales.

Another area of concern is that EU member Denmark recently supported plans to hunt the humpback whale off the coast of Greenland, a move that highlights the risks to a united European stance against whaling. The 62nd IWC annual meeting will be held in Agadir in Morocco from 21 to 25 June 2010.