Member States are required to control fishing activities in their waters as well as those of their fishing vessels even if they catch their fish outside European waters.
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The Court of Auditors of the European Union (EU) denounced, Monday, September 26, the disparity of controls and sanctions against illegal fishing among the Twenty-Seven, pointing to a lack of efficiency in the verification of imported fishing products.
States are required to control fishing activities in their waters as well as those of their fishing vessels even if they catch their fish outside European waters. If national controls allow “often” to detect illicit practices, “significant flaws” are “causing overfishing and under-reporting of catches”is alarmed in a report by the institution based in Luxembourg.
For the period 2015-2019, the States carried out 345,510 inspections, of which 13% made it possible to detect a suspected violation. Some 76% of the 69,400 reported offenses were detected by only four Member States: Italy, United Kingdom, Greece, Spain. About a quarter of the offenses relate to cases of fishing in a prohibited area or after the fixed quotas have been exhausted, while 34% relate to a failure to report catch data.