French riot police met the Greenpeace Organisation's ship “Sirius” with CS gas, when she tried to enter Cherbourg harbour in January 1983. She was acting in defiance of injunctions and a ban imposed on Greenpeace vessels by the harbour Prefect after an earlier similar protest against the import of spent nuclear fuel in 1980. She and her international crew were detained for several days; her captain was prosecuted and the UK Director of the environmental protest organisation, Mr. Peter Wilkinson, was held in prison overnight by virtue of an injunction – of which he had been unaware – against his personal presence anywhere in France.