Flags of Convenience: Legal issues in relation to fishing the Southern Ocean.

• Main Author: Lawton, Ella
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: English
• Published: University of Canterbury 2007
• Subjects: Antarctic; Southern Ocean; Antarc*; Australian Antarctic Division
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10092/13953

Flags of Convenience (FOC), whereby states open their fishing registries to nationals other than their own, can be particularly lucrative, especially if the owner intends to flout international standards on fishing standards in the Southern Ocean (DeSombre 2005). Fishing within the Southern Ocean falls under the regime of the 1980 Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR). Ocean regulation is difficult because of the vastness of the ocean and the number of ships whose behaviour influences the success of international regulatory efforts (DeSombre 2005). In response, a number of initiatives under both CCAMLR and the newly founded High Seas Task Force (HSTF) are attempting to combat Illegal Unreported Unregulated (IUU) fishing. There are large difficulties in the logistics of High Seas regulation that creates loopholes in the current IUU Southern Ocean system. Using FOCs of states that are not signatories to International agreements such as CCAMLR intensifies the problem, as they are not legally bound to abide by any measures implemented by international agreement. The use of FOCs by a number of CCAMLR nationals is evident yet current trends in international economy and business make these ‘front companies’ particularly difficult to apprehend (Australian Antarctic Division, 2003). Upon sourcing information, no books or journal articles were found to focus solely on FOC in the Southern Ocean. Very few focused specifically on FOCs. There are few varying observations because there is often only one of them.