Informal consultations to begin in the General Assembly today (4 October) concerning the conservation of fish stocks, under provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, were the subject of a Headquarters press conference yesterday, sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and given by the Permanent Representatives of three Member States and officials of marine-related environmental groups.
Actress Sigourney Weaver also attended and said today's discussions would go on behind closed doors and members of the public would not be allowed in, but the eyes of the world would be watching. She joined the other panellists in urging, in particular, that countries should set a near date for banning a kind of high-seas fishing known as “bottom trawling” - a practice said to be like “strip-mining the ocean floor” in pursuit of fish, and damaging to ecosystems.
Also in attendance were Lisa Speer, Natural Resources Defence Council for the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition; Ellen Pikitch, Executive Director at the Pew Institute for Ocean Science, University of Miami; Robert Hill, Permanent Representative of Australia; Stuart Beck, Permanent Representative of Palau, and Rosemary Banks, Permanent Representative of New Zealand.
Ms Speer said the United Nations was entering the endgame of a three year-long set of discussions on what to do about bottom trawling. Today, the General Assembly will begin debating how to proceed, and whether to ban this practice where it was unregulated on the high seas.
