Vast areas of the world’s oceans remain effectively unmonitored, allowing illegal fishing and serious human rights abuses to persist out of sight. A new report from the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) calls for urgent, fleet-wide adoption of onboard CCTV, arguing it could transform transparency for a sustainable ocean.
The report finds that illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing is routinely linked to violence, intimidation and forced labour. The chronic lack of independent oversight on fishing vessels, particularly in distant-water and high seas fisheries, enables this.
Fisheries observers, long considered the gold standard, cover only…