The commission’s founders settled on a self-inspection scheme to maintain its regulations, rejecting economic sanctions or common penalties. Not surprisingly, some members quickly came under suspicion for not abiding by the rules. The most flagrant violations were the work of Aristotle Onassis’s Panamanian-flagged expedition, which broke nearly every rule of the convention. The most systematic violations were committed by the Soviet whalers, who submitted false data for almost every year from 1949 to 1972 and regularly hunted out of season. In each case, other whalers produced irrefutable evidence that Onassis and the Soviets were violating at least some of the regulations.
Despite this evidence, IWC members generally declined to respond. Onassis’s fleet had to halt operations briefly when Peru’s navy seized its ships, but it went out of business only when Japanese interests purchased it. Soviet violations troubled the other members, but they feared that a confrontation would lead to Soviet departure from the commission and the subsequent departure of other whaling states. The violations ceased only in 1972 when the Soviets allowed a mutual inspection scheme with the Japanese. The lack of compliance not only hurt the IWC’s effectiveness, but it also undercut efforts to promote international cooperation in regulation of the sea’s resources in the face of efforts to expand territorial waters.