The European Parliament PECH Committee should vote to reduce opacity regarding how Member States monitor their fishing fleets, including those operating outside EU waters
The European Parliament PECH Committee will cast an important vote on 26 January on the revision of the Fisheries Control regulation.
On 14th January, CFFA added its voice to more than 60 other civil society organisations (CSO), asking this Committee to support amendments to the revised control regulation that will ensure more transparency about how the EU Member States monitor and control their fishing fleets to fight illegal fishing and potential corruption. These amendments were supported already by the EP’s Committee on the Environment (ENVI) in September 2020.
The adoption of these amendments would encourage EU Member States and the European Commission to regularly publish detailed information and aggregated data about how they are implementing the fisheries control rules. ‘Unless this information is made publicly available by Member States and the EU, other Member States, civil society, individuals with grounds of legitimate interest and MEPs are all in the dark about whether the control and sanctions regime is being enforced’, emphasizes the CSOs letter.
These demands are of particular relevance for EU fleets fishing outside EU waters. In the last couple of years, several cases of illegal fishing by EU flagged vessels in African waters have been reported by CFFA’s African partners.
In 2019, CFFA and other EU and African organisations jointly lodged a complaint to the European Commission following a failure by Italian authorities to adopt measures to monitor and control their vessels in the waters of Sierra Leone, where they had been fishing in coastal zones reserved for small scale fishers.
End of 2020, we received information about Latvian-flagged vessels fishing for small pelagics under the EU-Mauritania SFPA, and not respecting the fishing zones established under the agreement.
These illegal incursions in coastal areas where artisanal fishers operate have grave consequences for African coastal communities: these EU flagged vessels not only illegally compete with local artisanal fishers for resources they depend on for their livelihoods, they also destroy local fishers nets and put lives at risk in the event of collision with local artisanal pirogues, especially when they come in the artisanal zone at night with all their lights off.
In the exchange CFFA had with the Commission following our complaint about Italian vessels fishing in Sierra Leone, we were informed that a Pilot case had been launched with Italy to try and address existing problems about the control of its external fleet, and that an audit of all EU Member States capacities to monitor and control their external fishing fleets had been conducted. CFFA wishes this audit to be made public.
The Commission has far-reaching competences to evaluate the implementation of the control rules in Member States, including by carrying out such audits. However, in contrast to other areas such as food safety where the audits are publicly available, the Commission does not publish any information regarding its audits of Member State fisheries control systems.
The future EU control regulation should address these issues. That is why it is essential that some key amendments are supported by the PECH Committee and in the Plenary, such as:
The publication of bi-annual reports on the implementation of the Control Regulation carried out by Member States, - and a summary of these reports to be publicly available;
The publication of European Commission audits of Member State control systems; and
Removing the right of Member States to veto the transmission of environmental data. Currently they do not even have to state a reason for such a veto.
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