Handling at the highest level for fishing vessels violating IUU fishing

In recent times, the inspection delegation of the Quang Ninh Department of Agriculture and Rural Development has been deployed to inspect compliance with the legal regulations on fisheries for fishing vessels and to handle and sanction illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing vessels operating in the waters of Quang Ninh province.

According to records, on the first day of deployment, the delegation inspected fishing vessels operating in the waters of Quang Ninh. Through inspection work, basically, ship owners had an awareness of strictly complying with the legal regulations on the exploitation of aquatic resources. However, there are still some errors arising during the inspection process, such as: exploitation is not done according to the registration license; some expired documents have not been supplemented.

For these cases, the working delegation made a record, reminded, and continued to disseminate and guide. At the same time, request vehicle owners to quickly complete the necessary procedures and strictly implement fishing according to their license.

The inspection delegation patrolled, inspected, controlled, and strictly handled violations of the Law on Fisheries and IUU fishing violations in local coastal waters. Handle at the highest level for ship owners and captains with illegal exploitation, no registration, no inspection, no installation of cruise monitoring equipment, or installed fishing vessels but loss of cruise monitoring signals at sea.

Mr. Do Dinh Minh, Director of the Sub-Department of Fisheries (Quang Ninh Department of Agriculture and Rural Development), said that the installation of equipment to connect the offshore vessel monitoring system aims to carry out cruise monitoring so that the functional agency can inspect and trace whether the fishing vessels' seafood exploitation at sea is in the right area and whether they have crossed the maritime boundary or not.

This is also a mandatory regulation that the province is focusing on handling to overcome warnings from the European Commission against illegal, unreported, and unregulated seafood exploitation in Quang Ninh.

However, according to Mr. Minh, detecting and handling fishing vessels that do not maintain cruise monitoring during operations is facing many difficulties.

"Fishing vessels lose their monitoring connection for many reasons. First, when they return to shore, the battery has to be removed, leading to connection loss. Second, the monitoring equipment is damaged while at sea. It is only possible to remind and disseminate about these errors, but it is very difficult to punish," said Mr. Minh.

To strengthen the management of fishing vessels that violate monitoring regulations, in recent times, officials of the Sub-Department of Fisheries have regularly coordinated with other branches to conduct inspection sessions at sea. Thereby, many cases of fishing vessels that violate monitoring regulations and do not maintain the operation of cruise monitoring equipment during operations at sea have been detected and administratively sanctioned. Violating ship owners were fined VND 20.5 million. In addition, the right to use the captain's certificate was revoked for 3.5 months.

"All cases punished were caught red-handed. During operations at sea, the functional force checked the ship and found that the monitoring equipment was not damaged, but the ship owner did not turn it on. This is a subjective error. In addition, many ships intentionally pulled out the equipment or impacted the equipment to lose connection, which were all handled," Mr. Minh said.