At the UN Oceans Conference in Nice, France, last week, the International Conservation Caucus Foundation UK, the Wildlife Justice Commission, the Environmental Justice Foundation, and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime convened a high-level roundtable at the UN Ocean Conference in Nice to spotlight a critical but under-addressed threat: crimes in the fisheries sector.
Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing and the trafficking of vulnerable marine species are not only accelerating biodiversity loss but also enabling corruption, forced labour, and transnational organised crime. The 2024 UNODC World Wildlife Crime Report confirms that marine species are now the most trafficked wildlife group globally.
These crimes have both global and local consequences, threatening ecosystems, communities, and economies on both land and sea. They undermine food security, destabilise legal fisheries, fuel criminal networks, and harm coastal livelihoods—from Asia to Africa, and the Americas to Europe. They also weaken the ocean’s critical ability to regulate the planet’s changing environmental systems and sustain life on Earth.
Despite their scale and impact, such crimes remain weakly enforced in domestic legislation and overlooked in global ocean governance. The roundtable’s participants—including Members of Parliament from the United Kingdom and legislators from Saint Lucia, Grenada, and Indonesia—called for urgent action to integrate criminal justice approaches into marine protection efforts.
Key recommendations include:
- Taking coordinated action to facilitate international cooperation and prevent crime displacement to territories with weaker laws or enforcement by harmonising and strengthening international and domestic legislation, including stronger penalties for high-level offenders.
- Providing capacity-building support to law enforcement agencies—particularly in coastal and developing States—to effectively investigate, prosecute, and deter crimes in the fisheries sector.
- Explicitly fostering and promoting successful cross-sector collaborations among law enforcement, civil society organizations, local communities, and the private sector through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), joint intelligence-led operations, Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs), databases, monitoring tools, and intelligence sharing.
- Encouraging national, regional, and international adoption and implementation of the Global Charter for Fisheries Transparency to enhance transparency across global fisheries supply chains, including publication of sanctions, disclosure of beneficial ownership of vessels, and harmonised flagging practices.
- Scaling up technology use—including satellite surveillance and blockchain solutions—to better detect, prevent, and investigate crimes in the fisheries sector.
- Addressing corruption and its links with other serious crimes such as drug and human trafficking by leveraging tools from the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) and the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC), including parallel corruption and financial investigations.
- Adopting a holistic approach to combat these crimes by promoting synergies among ocean, biodiversity, the planet’s changing environmental systems, governance, and criminal law frameworks—linking efforts across the Nice Ocean Action Plan, UNCAC, UNTOC, Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, International Maritime Organization (IMO), International Labour Organization (ILO), and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
- Increasing awareness among policymakers, civil society, and the public about fisheries crimes, IUU fishing, and trafficking of vulnerable marine species to build political will and mobilise action.
Protecting marine species and ocean health is vital to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals—especially SDG 14 (Life Below Water) and SDG 16 (Justice and Strong Institutions).
It is time to confront the crimes threatening both our ocean and our societies—and ensure marine trafficking is treated as a central priority in global ocean policy.
