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41 Ecology L.Q. 939 (2014)
Laundering Fish in the Global Undercurrents: Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing and Transnational Organized Crime

handle is hein.journals/eclawq41 and id is 973 raw text is: Laundering Fish in the Global Undercurrents: Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing and Transnational Organized Crime Anastasia Telesetsky With illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing accounting for the removal of nearly one out of every eight fish from the oceans, illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing is a problem of global proportion. A growing amount of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing is the result of expansion into new business ventures by transnational organized criminal groups that are easily facilitated within the margins of the law by unregulated access to flags of convenience, little regulation of transshipments, the existence of ports of convenience, and an active business in offshore shell companies and tax havens. This Article argues that part of the failure of states to respond to the growing illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing crisis is a lack of effective governance by both vertical and horizontal government networks. In contrast, transnational criminal networks have functional and flexible governance networks that permit them to respond nimbly to changes in government enforcement. To address global illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, horizontal government networks should focus on addressing large-scale illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing as a transnational crime problem and not as afishery management challenge. Given the irreparable damage to both marine living resources and to fishery-related livelihood, illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing should be regarded as a transnational serious crime. Under the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, states should create sanctions that explicitly identify illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing by transnational syndicates as serious crime (requiring at least four years of imprisonment) and invest additional state funding in monitoring and enforcement of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. This Article proposes a number of additional suggestions to strengthen the capacity of domestic government networks, including characterizing illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing as a serious crime in national fisheries codes, harmonizing criminal laws on illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing