A dozen activists from environmental group Greenpeace demonstrated outside the Japanese embassy in Stockholm today to protest against Japan's whaling policy, Greenpeace said.
The group placed a hundred boxes filled with contents resembling whale meat in the embassy's driveway and two activists chained themselves to the entrance gates.
The demonstrators also unfurled a banner that read "Closed due to Vote-Buying".
"Japan's strategy is to offer small countries development aid money in exchange for their votes in the International Whaling Commission (IWC), a strategy that has been successful because countries like Sweden do not take action against this tactic," Greenpeace campaign leader Mr Frode Pleym said in a statement.
Japan admitted last year it used overseas aid to win support for its campaign to lift an international ban on whaling.
Monday's protest action took place just a week ahead of the start of the IWC's annual plenary session, which will be held this year in Shimonoseki, southern Japan.
Japan plans to urge the 43-nation body to allow it to expand its "research" whaling program by killing an extra 100 whales a year, including 50 endangered sei whales, which it says need to be killed to study the impact they are having on Japanese fishers.
AFP