As part of Greenpeace campaigns and within the bounds of “non-violent direct action” we sometimes take legal or physical risks in order to expose an environmental scandal, stop environmental damage etc.

In such cases, those involved make a personal decision to accept the risk and potential legal consequences of their action.

However in this case the reaction of the Japanese government has gone well beyond the normal legal consequence for such activity, and this has become a politically motivated persecution in an attempt to silence opposition to whaling and shut down Greenpeace in Japan.

It’s not just Greenpeace that sees it this way – a joint statement of concern was made by Amnesty International and 32 other non government organisations about the situation: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/releases/tokyo-two-statement-of-concer

We believe that it is not our activists that should be on trial, but the Japanese Government’s whaling programme.
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/press/reports/whale-meat-scandal-dossier

In past cases activists have been acquitted on the grounds that the environmental crime that they were protesting justified the tactics that they used.

We believe that the ongoing scandal of the Japanese Government’s whaling programme, including the impacts of hunting whales in the name of bogus science, the squandering of Japanese taxpayers money, the disregard for the International Whaling Commission’s moratorium on commercial whaling (the programme is clearly commercial whaling thinly disguised as “science”) and the internationally agreed Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary certainly justify the steps taken by our activists to expose the scandal of and ultimately bring an end to the whaling programme.