A Greenland court will decide Wednesday whether to keep US-Canadian anti-whaling activist Paul Watson in custody pending a decision on his extradition to Japan, where he is wanted over an altercation with whalers. The fourth hearing since Watson was arrested in July began at 9:00 am (1000 GMT) in Nuuk, capital of the Danish autonomous territory. Watson's lawyer Julie Stage told AFP ahead of the hearing that she would ask for his immediate release, adding: "But unfortunately, realistically, that may not happen.
" Stage said she was preparing an appeal to be filed with Denmark's Supreme Court over the Nuuk court's earlier ruling on October 2 to keep the 73-year-old in custody. Watson was detained in Nuuk in July on a 2012 Japanese arrest warrant, which accuses him of causing damage to a whaling ship in the Antarctic in 2010 and injuring a whaler. But Stage said she did not believe the criteria for his detention had been met.
Watson, who featured in the reality TV series "Whale Wars", founded Sea Shepherd and the Captain Paul Watson Foundation (CPWF) and is known for radical tactics including confrontations with whaling ships at sea. He was arrested on July 21 when his ship, the John Paul DeJoria, docked to refuel in Nuuk on its way to "intercept" a new Japanese whaling factory vessel in the North Pacific, according to the CPWF. In a rare public comment on the case, Japan's Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya recently insisted the extradition request was "an issue of law enforcement a.