The Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), Oceana and WWF have welcomed a new European Commission requirement that all EU fishing vessels, and foreign vessels fishing in EU waters, need to have unique vessel numbers from construction to disposal.
This will affect up to 8,205 European vessels and has been described as a key reform that will help close a decades-old loophole that allows fishing vessels around the world to evade scrutiny, fueling illegal fishing.
EJF’s executive director Steve Trent said, “This is a powerful signal by the EU that fisheries must become more transparent. Sometimes the simplest reforms can have profound impacts, and that is the case here. It is ridiculous that planes, cars and even European cows have unique numbers to enable lifetime tracking, but fishing vessels haven’t. This has allowed unscrupulous operators to fish illegally in one country and then swiftly change identity and nationality and do the same elsewhere.”
Until recently, a global scheme operated by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) that assigned unique numbers to vessels for their entire lives specifically excluded fishing vessels. In December 2013, the IMO partly removed the exemption, allowing fishing vessels into the scheme on a voluntary basis. The EU has now made the number mandatory for all vessels above 24m length fishing in EU waters and EU vessels over 15m fishing overseas.
The NGOs are now calling on other states to follow the EU’s lead, and for the EU to require industrial fishing vessels importing into the EU to also carry IMO numbers. They also say that the vessel information associated with an IMO number needs be regularly updated, and eventually gathered at the global level in the form of a global record of fishing vessels.
