Transparency, or public access to information, is now high on the international agenda for fisheries reforms. It is likely to be a major theme of the upcoming ‘Our Ocean’ conference in Norway. However, for small-scale fisheries organisations it is important that the international push for transparency is not dominated by anti-IUU campaigns. Unfortunately this is what seems to be happening, led by conservation NGOs and think tanks. This is far too narrow a focus. Poor information sharing between governments and small-scale fisheries affects a much wider set of issues relating to tenure rights and ensuring fair and sustainable access to fish. Therefore transparency—or access to information—must be promoted within a human rights framework, linked closely to the objectives of democratic representation and accountability.
Transparency and a human rights based approach
The Earth Summit in 1992 helped establish that access to information is a procedural right to achieve fundamental human rights, including the right to a healthy environment. It is also considered one of the vital conditions for sustainable management of natural resources. This was captured in Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration:
Environmental issues are best handled with participation of all concerned citizens, at the relevant level. At the national level, each individual shall have appropriate access to information concerning the environment that is held by public authorities, including information on hazardous materials and activities in their communities, and the opportunity to participate in decision-making processes. States shall facilitate and encourage public awareness and participation by making information widely available. Effective access to judicial and administrative proceedings, including redress and remedy, shall be provided.
What was progressive about this statement was that it described how the three rights of access to information, participation in decision making and access to justice must be combined. The Aarhus Convention, initially focused on the EU and European states, but now extended to include countries from Central Asia, was the first effort to make these principles a reality. Until recently it was the only legally binding multilateral treaty guaranteeing these rights for all citizens. The Aarhus Convention asserts obligations on governments to share information with citizens when this is requested, and it has a strict interpretation of the legitimate grounds for keeping information confidential—commercial interests are not as important as the public interest.
Additionally the Convention obliges States to collate and publish information on the state of the environment and on policies and legislation. Furthermore—and often overlooked, Article 3.7 of the Aarhus Convention obliges parties to promote the application of its provisions in the international environmental decision-making process.
UNEP has been engaged with global advocacy to enlarge the Aarhus Convention to other regions of the World, which involved producing the “Bali Guidelines for the Adoption of National Legislation on access to information, participation in decision making and access to justice” in 2010. The Aarhus Convention, the Bali Guidelines and the Rio Declaration have all fed into a long process that has culminated in the Escazu Convention, which is a binding treaty covering 17 countries in South and Central America.
Other documents have recognised the importance of access to information for small-scale fisheries in particular. This includes the Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests, finalised in 2012 and endorsed by the vast majority of states. Two years later, transparency, participation and access to justice was further stressed as obligations for States in the Voluntary Guidelines on Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries. The two voluntary Guidelines were taken a step further with the ‘United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas’, Article 11 of this land mark document states:
1. Peasants and other people working in rural areas have the right to seek, receive, develop and impart information, including information about factors that may affect the production, processing, marketing and distribution of their products.
2. States shall take appropriate measures to ensure that peasants and other people working in rural areas have access to relevant, transparent, timely and adequate information in a language and form and through means adequate to their cultural methods so as to promote their empowerment and to ensure their effective participation in in decision-making in matters that may affect their lives, land and livelihoods.
The implementation of human rights on transparency is of course a long way off and small-Scale fisheries in many parts of the world do not have these rights at all. A global survey on access to information rights for small-scale fisheries would be most useful to demonstrate this more clearly and track progress over time.
The Fisheries Transparency Initiative, now based in the Seychelles, is an effort to help implement these rights, and was developed by a multi-stakeholder steering committee that explicitly made reference to Principle 10, The Aarhus Convention and the two voluntary guidelines on fisheries in their work to produce the FiTI Standard.
Transparency and fighting IUU fishing
The problem of illegal fishing has undoubtedly become a key concern for achieving sustainable fisheries around the world. To what extent this is merited is unclear, as estimates of the scale and impact of IUU fishing are highly unreliable, and probably over exaggerate the costs to coastal states. A great risk involved in the global fight against IUU fishing is that is simplifies threats to small-scale fisheries and narrows efforts towards a law enforcement approach. In many places it is not simply companies breaking the law that is threatening to the tenure rights of fishing communities, but otherwise lawful activities by corporations that are supported by governments and international organisations.
Given this questionable priority afforded to fighting illegal fishing, it is inevitable that the current debate on transparency in fisheries has emphasised it as a strategic tool supporting law enforcement efforts. While there have been several initiatives that try to partner governments in vessel monitoring , such as Fish-I in Africa, it would seem that the ‘Global Fishing Watch’ is the most ambitious and successful. Pew Charitable trust has also launched a very similar project called ‘project eyes on the seas’.
GFW was established by the US based ‘skytruth’ organisation, which began by using satellite data to track oil spills, and then later to produce maps of mining impacts on natural habitats and the spread of fracking sites. In partnership with Oceana and Google, Skytruth launched a new project that would gather all available satellite data on vessels at sea, and by using an algorithm, interpret the movements of these vessels to identify fishing activity, as well as potential transhipping of catches at sea.
Taking this work a step further, GFW is working with governments to increase fisheries transparency, by releasing Vessel Monitoring data, which will then be uploaded on the GFW map in almost real time. The government of Indonesia was the first to sign up to this request, followed by commitments to do the same by Peru, Panama, Chile and Namibia. The promotional material published by GFW and reproduced widely by the media and at international conferences includes the statement that “Transparency is crucial for good stewardship of our global ocean - to fight illegal fishing, to protect fish stocks and livelihoods, and to increase the safety and well-being of fishers.”
The satellite data provided by GFW is publicly available for anyone to use, and they have an extensive team analysing the images to spot infractions. Some of the key problems it is trying to reveal is with vessels fishing in prohibited zones and the extent of transhipping at sea (although this is not always illegal). Their data is also helping research on measuring the number of fishing vessels operating in the world and it is reported by GFW that the data can help define areas that are opportune for marine protection and no fishing activities. Future plans of the GFW is to include maps of the activities of small-scale fisheries as well.
GFW therefore makes a potentially significant contribution to monitoring the activities of fishing vessels at sea. How big an impact it will have remains uncertain. Transparency initiatives designed to fight illegal corporate activities or corruption have had a difficult time in proving their effectiveness; partly because releasing floods of data does not result in many people actually using it, but more importantly corporate and state interests can be left relatively unharmed; the problem is not only getting data but getting governments to do anything about the problems it reveals. We have therefore seen that the European Commission has been less than transparent on its efforts to address illegal fishing in third country’s waters, which led to an access to information case submitted to the EC . As such, there is the difficulty in understanding how transparency helps catch illegal fishers when the data requested to be published is already available to authorities who should be able to detect illegal fishing themselves and take appropriate action?
The importance of treating transparency as a human right
GFW campaign will be challenged by most governments and the fishing sector, as they will not allow VMS data to be broadcast in real time. This is due to the long standing position that this information is commercially sensitive, and not in the public interest. GFW argue that this is not a valid position, and they take the view that the need to fight illegal fishing means such data should be released by authorities. This debate is important, including claims that publishing real time VMS data may have unintended outcomes, such as being used by competitors to spot good fishing grounds. But the work of GFW, as well as other voluntary transparency initiatives, would be much stronger if they established the public interest claim for government held data on the private sector through a court of law, using treaties such as Aarhus and Escazu. Otherwise the decision of governments to share data are gestures and therefore easily removed. With a court ruling related to human rights, it establishes the public right to information, which sets a legal precedent. Advocacy on transparency or public access to information must advance legal precedents, which is the key to supporting people's rights to information in other countries and ensuring these rights are more permanent.
While not detracting from the positive potential of the GFW and other similar efforts, what is problematic is the claim that governments are embracing transparency by consenting to the publication of their VMS data. The message that government transparency equates to publicising real time vessel monitoring systems data is far too limited and could detract from advancing access to information rights as a human right.
Satellite monitoring is surveillance of private sector activities. It is not a mechanism to advance people’s ability to engage with governments on important policy decisions, such as who is granted fishing rights, what types of fishing are permitted by authorities, what other commercial developments are being allowed in coastal fishing zones etc. Indeed, what is apparent in the FiTI is that getting governments to publish otherwise confidential information is not the only (or primary) concern of many stakeholders—it is rather working with governments and fisheries businesses to collate and publish information that is either not available or is considered highly unreliable, such as on public data regarding the size of small-scale fisheries, the number of people working in fish processing, the food security contributions of fisheries, stock assessments, data on the use of domestic subsidies, the impact of aid programmes or the expansion of other ocean industries, such as aquaculture, and oil and gas. As is clear in the Aarhus Convention, access to information goes beyond releasing confidential information, and it includes the obligation for governments to try and collate and share information that citizens consider is essential for policy-making.
At events, such as the ‘Our Ocean’s conference’, public surveillance of vessels should therefore not be centre stage on issues of access to information and transparency. This mistakenly equates transparency to civil society efforts to help governments catch illegal fishing vessels. Rather the emphasis should be on the obligation to implement the Voluntary Guidelines, the UN Declaration on the rights of peasants and rural people, and ultimately expand legal treaties, such as the Aarhus and Escazu Conventions.