Supporting governments in tackling illegal activities in the logging and fishing industries
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Resource Extraction Monitoring Supporting governments in tackling illegal activities in the logging and fishing industries |
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Can Independent Monitoring help improve law enforcement of the fisheries sector?
International efforts to counter the fishing sector problems include sustainability certification (Marine Stewardship Council), the establishment of Regional Fisheries Management Organisations, and, more recently, the passing of a new EU Directive on IUU fishing (EC1005/2008) that includes a certification scheme for legality. But a key gap in current initiatives is a process to fully understand the law enforcement and governance capacities of exporting countries. This is a serious problem because, under certification schemes such as the one proposed by the EC council regulation, certificates will have little credibility if little is known about the realities of law enforcement practices in a certain country. REM believes that our independent monitoring can help address this problem by providing credible and detailed information on specific enforcement and governance problems. For more details about our concept for an independent monitoring of fisheries law enforcement and governance (IM-FiLEG) download the concept note here. If your organisation, government or company is involved in the fisheries
sector and would like to discuss the development of an IM-FiLEG pilot
programme in more detail, please contact
us. Sri Lanka IM-FiLEG pilot projectA collaboration between Rainforest Rescue International (RRI) and REM aims to encourage good governance in the fisheries sector in Sri Lanka, with a special focus on tuna fisheries. This pilot project was designed to assess and develop the role of civil society. Over the 18 months of the project, RRI and REM have worked together to build an independent monitoring model that could make a real progress towards the following objective. ObjectiveTo make progress in three areas of fisheries sector, towards the sustainable development of the national fisheries industry:
ActorsThe Ministry of fisheries: information is forwarded
to the Central Ministry via the provincial Ministry, informing it of the
results of the reading committee meetings, highlighting enforcement actions
that have been taken at the Provincial level by the administration and
others. The rapporteur also communicates suggested enforcement and policy
actions to the central government. Data generated by the monitoring operations
can be used by research and management bodies such as NARA. Projet outputs and reports Developing the role
of Sri Lankan civil society in IM-FiLEG Other Sri Lanka project documents Letter from
the Minister on IMFiLEG Search this site: |
Illegal,
Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing is one of the greatest threats
to fisheries worldwide. While there are certainly difference between the
fisheries and forestry sectors there are many commonalities when it comes
to law enforcement and governance problems such as a lack of transparency,
low investment in enforcement where it counts, imbalanced power relations
between private and public sectors, out-of-date and impractical policies,
absence of robust traceability mechanisms, and a lack of accountability
within the senior echelons of government. 