Fishery resources: technical and control measures in the Skagerrak

The Council held an orientation debate on the proposal for a regulation on certain technical and control measures in the Skagerrak.

Most Member States welcomed the proposal and considered it as a regional experiment on the actual implementation of a discard ban, where regionalisation and discard ban constitute two pillars of the proposed CFP reform. However, a certain number of issues were raised:

• many delegations highlighted that these provisions should not set a precedent for the reform of the CFP. They considered that the content of arrangements for the landing of all catches should be tailored to specific regional circumstances;
• a number of Member States questioned the obligation to have fully documented fisheries and closed circuit TV (CCTV) cameras installed on board vessels to monitor fisheries, in particular because this was not an obligation for Norwegian vessels when fishing in EU waters.
• lastly, several delegations mentioned other provisions to explore as alternatives to CCTV, such as selectivity, monitoring at ports or observers on board.