Ocean protection associations file a complaint against French tuna vessels, suspected of fishing in prohibited areas

2023-06-01 22:31:59

Ocean protection associations filed a complaint on Thursday 1^is June, with the Paris prosecutor’s office against the twenty tuna vessels registered in France, suspected of turning off their tracking system, supposed to remain on, to fish in prohibited areas.

This automatic identification system (or AIS, for Automatic Identification System) is mandatory for vessels over 15 meters and must be operational at all times, according to European control regulations.

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The French NGO Bloom and the British NGO Blue Marine Foundation accuse these 21 huge vessels, over 80 meters and owned by three companies, of disabling their AIS “for several days, even several weeks”according to the complaint.

Thus it is “impossible to know where these vessels operate, sometimes for several weeks in a row, leaving full the possibility of fishing in areas that are prohibited to them, such as certain exclusive economic zones or marine protected areas”they accused Thursday in a press release.

“These are breaches of European and national legislation which justify an investigation being opened and responsibilities cleared, so that these behaviors are severely punished”underlined their lawyer, Mr.^e Francois Lafforgue.

Interruptions “without legitimate justification”

These associations base their accusations on a calculation made from a data file that they have been able to consult. This file contains nearly 4 million lines, “each line corresponding to the position of one of the 21 French tuna seiners at a given time t”reports the complaint.

These associations have endeavored to calculate the time elapsed between two AIS signals received for each vessel. They tried to retrace the route of these tuna boats, in the Gulf of Guinea or the Indian Ocean, off Madagascar. They retained the long periods of extinction, equal to or greater than forty-eight hours, excluding the shorter deactivations from their calculation.

Result : “for each of the 21 ships studied” were noted interruptions in the transmission of data from “several days, even several weeks”And this “without legitimate justification”. Between 1^is January 2021 and April 25, 2023, “these vessels turned off their beacons 37% to 72% of the time”. With their complaint, these organizations hope “obtain total transparency on the fishing activities of French tuna shipowners”.

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The World with AFP