Key: Whaling arrest out of NZ hands

FIREPOWER: Shonan Maru2 fires water at the Ady Gil in their clash last month. INSERT: Pete Bethune

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Prime Minister John Key says the Government can not intervene in Japan's legal processes to help anti-whaling campaigner Peter Bethune.

The Australian and New Zealand Green parties have called for their governments to intervene over the case.

Bethune, 44, was arrested on Friday. He was captain of the protest organisation Sea Shepherd's high-tech powerboat that was sliced in two in a collision with the Shonan Maru II in January.

In mid-February he climbed aboard the Japanese ship before dawn from a jet ski with the stated intention of making a citizen's arrest of captain Hiroyuki Komiya for what he said was the attempted murder of his six crew.

Bethune also presented the Japanese whalers with a US$3 million (NZ$4.3 million) bill for the futuristic carbon-and-kevlar trimaran Ady Gil, which sank in the icy waters a day after the collision on January 6.

Mr Key said his Foreign Minister Murray McCully had kept in contact with the Japanese ambassador and diplomats were playing their part in Japan.

"The situation is...he's going to be charged across a range of different sort of breaches of the law, potentially," Mr Key told TVNZ's Breakfast programme.

"Peter Bethune is obviously a person who cares deeply about what he's doing, he's also a person who made it quite clear when he got on board that boat that he didn't want to be taken off, he did want to be taken to Japan. So clearly he has thought all this through and has thought the exposure that he will get for this warrants his activities."

Other than consular support there was little the Government could do, Mr Key said.

"We can't actually interfere in the Japanese legal process."

Sea Shepherd, which has called Bethune the first New Zealander taken as a "prisoner of war" to Japan since World War II, is working on his legal defence.

The group declared an end to this season's three-month pursuit of Japanese harpoon ships in Antarctic waters on February 27, saying it had been the most successful campaign yet because it had stopped all whaling on 33 days.

- NZPA