Watson accuses feds of withholding evidence in sealing case

The Canadian government is withholding key pieces of evidence in an East Coast anti-sealing case that is scheduled to go to trial on Monday, an environmental activist says.

Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society said the Fisheries Department seized the log books and global positioning system from the Farley Mowat, the 54-metre vessel at the centre of a high-seas tussle with the coast guard a year ago.

Watson, the militant group's founder, said Fisheries officials took the ship's record books when it seized the protest vessel and charged the two crew with coming too close to the seal hunt without a proper permit.

Watson said the seizure has deprived the two crewmen of their ability to defend themselves since they can't prove their contention that they were beyond the federal government's reach because they didn't enter Canadian waters.

"Our GPS has all of the co-ordinates to prove absolutely that we never entered Canadian waters," he said last week from Hawaii where he was giving a speech.

"It's a joke. It's the old Napoleonic code of you're guilty until you're proven innocent and they have no intention of proving anyone innocent."

Watson also said the crewmen, Captain Alexander Cornelissen of the Netherlands and first mate Peter Hammarstedt of Stockholm, have been told by the Immigration Department that because they were deported they're not allowed to enter Canada, even though they're facing trial.

It's not clear whether they would appear Monday or how the trial would proceed if they fail to show up since Watson said they are defending themselves.

Immigration and fisheries officials did not return calls about the case.

The two men were charged last year with violating the Fisheries Act by navigating the ship within 900 metres of working seal hunters. That's an offence under federal regulations unless an observer's permit has been granted. The Mowat did not have one.

The captain was also charged with obstructing a fisheries officer. They both pleaded not guilty at an earlier hearing and could face a fine of up to $100,000 if convicted.

Both Watson and Farley Mowat, a Canadian literary icon and the vessel's namesake, insist the seizure and arrests were illegal since the ship is Dutch-registered and was outside Canada's 12-mile territorial limit.

Then fisheries minister Loyola Hearn said the Mowat came within nine metres of a group sealers at one point on March 30, 2008, shattering floes as sealers scrambled to get back to their small boat. Maritime law experts have said that Fisheries was within its right to arrest the ship and its crew if they were indeed violating seal hunt regulations since Canada has jurisdiction over fish and marine mammals out to 200 nautical miles.

Cornelissen wouldn't say whether he planned to travel to Cape Breton from his home in Ecuador to face the charges, but claimed he would continue his opposition to the annual hunt.

"We do intend to fight the Orwellian dictates of the Federal Department of Fisheries and we are also trying to pass the obstacles that the Canadian government is placing in our way to prevent a fair hearing," he said in an email.

"Despite deportation orders and possible verdicts, we have every intention of coming back over and over again until this massacre stops."

Paula Taylor, senior counsel with the Public Prosecution Service in Halifax, wouldn't comment on the matter but said cases can proceed without the accused as long as they have been properly served.

She also said there are provisions in the Criminal Code that allow someone to access material being held, but it wasn't clear whether the crew tried to obtain their log books.

The seizure of Mowat followed tense confrontations on the ice floes between its 17 crew members and the coast guard.

The coast guard said the icebreaker Des Groseilliers was "grazed" twice by the Farley Mowat about 60 kilometres north of Cape Breton as the protest ship closed in on some seal hunters.

But Watson dismissed the charge, saying its much smaller ship was struck twice by the 98-metre icebreaker.

Weeks later, black-clad Mounties brandishing submachine-guns boarded the Mowat and arrested all crew members, who said they were forced to lay down on the deck of the ship while some were handcuffed.