While much of the focus on whaling is currently centred around the Southern Ocean, an important legal case has began in a regional courtroom in northern Japan. Two Japanese Greenpeace activists dubbed 'the Tokyo Two' will stand trial for trespass and the theft of whale meat. If found guilty they could face 10 years in prison.

Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki say they intercepted the meat as it was being smuggled from a Japanese whaling ship by a member of the crew on the Nisshin Maru, the Japanese Antarctic whaling fleet's mother ship, destined for the black market. Instead of seeing charges laid against the whalers Japanese officials charged the activists - both were detained in June 2008, two months after the incident.

The meat package, retrieved from a warehouse in Aomori, northern Japan, was marked "cardboard" but contained 23kg of salted whale meat worth around 350,000 yen (£2,477).

Greenpeace said it also had evidence to prove that at least 23 of the ship's crew smuggled more than 90 boxes of salted whale, disguised as personal baggage. Since the arrests, more than 250,000 people have signed a petition demanding justice for Sato, aged 32 and Suzuki, aged 42. A provision in the International Whaling Commission's 1986 ban on commercial whaling permits Japan to conduct "lethal research" into about 1,000 whales in the Southern ocean each year.