Eight internationally recognised NGOs have made a submission to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, John Knox, regarding the continued exploitation of fisheries workers at sea.
The submission is the combined work of the Human Rights at Sea, Environmental Justice Foundation, Fairfood International, Greenpeace, International Labor Rights Forum, International Transport Workers’ Federation, International Union of Food, Allied Workers National Guestworker Alliance and Walk Free Foundation.
Above NGOs have joint their forces urging UN to look at the continued exploitation of fisheries workers at sea and the connections between human rights and labour abuses in the fishing sector with the practices of overfishing and illegal, unreported, unregulated (IUU) fishing
The groups, as longtime observers of the seafood industry, say that it is clear that the last few decades of rapid biodiversity loss at sea can be largely attributed to the fishing sector and have direct links to human rights violations, both of which feed back to each other in a vicious cycle of ocean destruction.
Insufficient monitoring, control and surveillance, both at sea and in port, and practices such as ‘transshipping’ catches to other vessels at sea, facilitate flouting fisheries regulations while allowing these failures to continue largely unseen. In turn, government fishing subsidies mitigate low fleet profitability while undermining attempts to put in place rules ensuring that these problems are effectively addressed.
The NGOs aim to highlight the urgency of the problem and offer best practices in order to address the main causes at each specific sector
Read full submission by clicking herebelow