The French courts have ruled in favour of the Union of Small-Scale Fishers from the Occitan Region (SPMO) and three other stakeholders in their four-year-long battle over access to fishing rights.
The class action, supported by the Low Impact Fishers of Europe, challenged the 2017 order allocating Bluefin tuna quotas, arguing that small-scale fishers are given minimal quotas or overlooked altogether.
At the preliminary hearing on 17 June 2021, the Clerk of the Tribunal made strong and substantiated submissions in favour of the small-scale fishers, analysis which proved instrumental in the judges’ decision on 15 July 2021 to annul the earlier order.
Consequences
This decision creates case law at national level which small-scale fishers can use in the future to push for changes to the Bluefin tuna quota allocation process, and could also be used to challenge the allocation of other species’ quotas.
It also has implications for the wider continent as the court’s analysis was based on the EU-wide Common Fisheries Policy as well as implications for the application of European law in France, finding as it did so that the method used to allocate quotas was neither transparent nor objective, contravening Article 17 of EU Regulation 1380/2013 of the CFP.
