Current international legal regime and its effectiveness in the management of shared fish stocks

Azizan, Hajimatt (2005) Current international legal regime and its effectiveness in the management of shared fish stocks. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

While shared stocks create some commonality of interests among states, they also present a potential source of tension, particularly when jurisdictional problems and resource access issues are present. Due to their mobility throughout the various maritime spaces, shared fish stocks pose special management and conservation problems. -- Lack of cooperation among relevant states and blatant disregard of the rights and duties of coastal states by distant water fishing (DWF) states have resulted in the uncontrollable harvesting of the resource and the cause of the many fisheries conflicts on the high seas. Canada's 1995 confrontation with Spain, which is now known as the 'turbot war' incident, is but one in the long history of high seas conflicts among sovereign states over shared fish stocks. Although the incident was the worst diplomatic dispute in the history of Canada-EU relationship, the action was necessitated by Canada's need to raise international awareness to the growing problems of managing shared fish stocks. -- This paper sets out to examine the effectiveness of the current international legal regime for the conservation and management of shared fishery stocks on the high seas beyond national jurisdictions. It provides the reader with an overview of the evolution of the international legal fisheries regime, and using Canada's experience as the backdrop to the discussion, evaluates the regime's effectiveness in enforcing international conservation measures against illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing vessels on the high seas.

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