Brussels fines France for decades of overfishing
TERESA KÜCHLER
01.03.2006 @ 17:58 CET
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Commission has ordered France to pay a multi-million euro penalty for failing to enforce EU fishing rules since the early 1990s.
Paris has been ordered to pay a fine of €57 million every six months until an adequate fisheries control system is in place.
The commission on Wednesday (1 March) announced that it had taken the action because France di not fulfill obligations laid out in a ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on 12 July last year.
France says it is being singled out for tough treatment on fish (Photo: EUobserver.com)
At the time, the court ordered Paris to pay a fine of €20 million for failing to respect the EU's fishing laws and an additional sum of €57.7 million every six months if it continued to ignore them.
A commission legal expert on Wednesday said that despite major progress, these were "far from sufficient" to make up for France's "historical deficit" in the matter.
The case dates back to June 1991, when the ECJ ruled that France had infringed EU law between 1984 and 1987 by not carrying out controls aimed at ensuring compliance with fisheries conservation measures.
According to the ruling, France failed in both fisheries control and breaking EU rules on landing and marketing of immature fish, particularly hake.
Paris will demand annulment
Reactions to the ruling came rapidly from Paris, where the government expressed its discontent with the sentence, claiming that the fine is disproportionate and unjustified.
"We will seek to annul the commission's sentence in the European Court of Justice (ECJ)," a French diplomat told EUobserver.
"We think that France has made sufficient progress," he said, adding that the amount of inspections of fishing activities on its coastlines was higher than the EU average.
An official at the ECJ said it would be the first time that the court deals with such a request, as earlier cases ended with the penalised country simply paying its fine.
The penalty comes six weeks after the commission named the UK, Denmark and Sweden as the only EU countries fully monitoring European fishing quota restrictions.
British conservative MEP Struan Stevenson welcomed Wednesday's ruling, saying fishermen from countries that abide by EU rules have been at a disadvantage.
NGOs pleased but want more
The decision was also welcomed by environmentalists.
"We would like the same measure to be applied to all countries guilty of over fishing on European waters," Ricardo Aguilar, research director of Madrid-based NGO Oceana, indicated.
He urged the commission to ban hake fishing outright in line with recommendations by the international scientific community, however.
"In the 80s, the total fishing of hake in the EU's southern waters was 15-25 tonnes a year. Now it is 5 million tonnes a year. The stock is not reproducing at all," he said.