33. The International Legal Framework for Conservation and Management of Fisheries and Marine Mammals

The record and ever-present danger of overfishing of living resources requires there to be a legal framework for the international management of these oceanic resources. The chapter opens with a history of the legal fisheries regime as it has developed since the late nineteenth century when the negative impact of overfishing on stocks was first noticed, highlighting how the remedial measures have had limited success because they have been biologically rather than economically grounded, including the pivotal concept, maximum sustainable yield. It then turns to an examination of the fisheries regime in the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, both in the exclusive economic zone, where the bulk of fisheries take place, and on the high seas. The following section then deals with six major innovations by which the 1995 UN Fish Stocks Agreement attempts to overcome these problems for stocks that straddle the boundary between national zones and the high seas or are highly migratory; this is complemented by the 1993 FAO Compliance Agreement covering some of the same ground. Non-economic uses have in recent decades become dominant as regards marine mammals. The framework for these is briefly introduced. Finally, a concluding section on current issues and future developments concentrates on the perennial problem of allocation among States of limited participatory rights in international fisheries and on the composite concept of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, which, because it is usually treated as a single undifferentiated phenomenon, threatens to obscure the important distinction between fishing that is unlawful and fishing that is merely unregulated.