Charting New Waters: Strengthening Fisheries Governance through Beneficial Ownership Transparency

Conclusion

BO information can be used to further fisheries policies in a number of ways. Primarily, it can be used to help strengthen the governance of fisheries tenure. This can be done by ensuring fishing licenses are awarded in line with tenure policies and helping to monitor and assess whether fisheries tenure policies are achieving their broader aims, including not just maximizing economic benefit but also ensuring that benefits accrue to the country’s population and fisheries communities. Making the information widely available enables other parties to use the data to participate in and oversee the fisheries sector. BO data can also be used to tackle various crimes in and adjacent to the fisheries sector, including corruption, as well as to detect and investigate their proceeds. Finally, BOT can indirectly and systemically improve fisheries sector governance.

Because fisheries sectors are highly transnational in nature and involve corporate vehicles and vessels from a range of different countries, standardization of the implementation of BOT across different jurisdictions is key to enabling the sharing and interoperability of BO data. Defining a common set of minimum information to be included in domestic asset registers for licenses and vessels, including reliable identifiers, will help leverage the progress made with BOT for corporate vehicles and allow for combining information automatically and at scale. Jurisdictions with fisheries sectors, RFMOs and multilateral organizations could advocate for and require minimum legal, policy, technical and data standards for registers of fisheries-related assets and BO of corporate vehicles. RFMOs can also set minimum standards for complementary measures and good fisheries governance policies. They may also be suitable platforms for sharing relevant information between countries. Other international mechanisms, such as the United Nations Convention against Corruption, could be strengthened to raise BOT-specific requirements for policy areas beyond AML, including fisheries governance. While BOT is not a silver bullet, knowing who owns and controls corporate vehicles involved in the sector at a domestic level is a prerequisite for effective fisheries governance and accountability.