Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-07-05-Speech-4-069-000"
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"en.20120705.9.4-069-000"2
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"Mr President, the EU regulation on illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing was a major step forward globally in the battle against IUU.
The Commission has been working very hard to convince both its Member States and third countries about how to implement the requirements of catch documents signed by the flag states, and some countries have been lobbying extremely hard to have exemptions from this rule, in order to let chartering states have the right to issue catch documents.
The concept of ‘chartering state’ does not even exist in international law; on the other hand, the concepts of ‘flag state’ and ‘flag state responsibility’ have been built up through hard work and international negotiations over decades, and now a small exemption, as proposed by the CITES working group, threatens to set a precedent and unravel all the work that has been done up till now.
We are all aware that the issue of chartering states is emerging at the speed of lightning in many of the world’s regional fisheries management organisations (RFMOs). Far too many countries would immediately use the argument that CITES allows this exemption as an excuse to introduce the same logic in the RFMOs, allowing chartering states to issue catch documents. This would totally undermine the IUU Regulation.
I add my voice to those asking what consequences this could have for flag state responsibility in commercial fleets. We should not underestimate this factor. The confusion over who bears responsibility when it comes to oil spills or dumping of toxic waste is already at a maximum with ships owned in one country, flagged to another, operating in a third and landing in a fourth, with a crew and beneficial owners in a fifth.
So what is the problem in CITES? It is not clear to me. Is it that a few countries, so-called ‘chartering states’, want to facilitate their administrative burden when they have to issue catch documents on a few hundred tonnes of endangered species of sharks that are on the CITES Annex 2 list? To let them do that, the world should not be ready to unravel international work on tightening the law against IUU – which actually accounts for one fifth of the world’s fish catches."@en1
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