From 1 July fisheries officers from the Swedish Board of fisheries will be able to directly hand out fines and withdraw fishing licences from fishermen misreporting their catches, or not handling their log books correctly. The action is another step towards improving fish stocks, says the Swedish government in a recent Press Release.
The EU Commission has criticized Sweden for only penalizing few offences of the fishing law. Even though Sweden increased sanctions for IUU fishing in 2003, only the most severe offences end up in court. On Monday the Swedish Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries, Eskil Erlandsson, left a referral to the council of legislation proposing a new law, suggesting that the Board of Fisheries are allowed to handle the administrative issues of offences of the fishing law. Sanctions will vary between 100 and 3000 Euros.
The current system is not effective enough, and the newly proposed system will facilitate the authorities handling time. In order to effectively sanction offenders, the Swedish board of fisheries will now be able to immediately hand out fines to those fishermen not properly registering their catches. In cases where the offences are severe or consistently repeated the fishing license can be withdrawn.
“It is important that we do what we can in order to minimise overfishing, we have to give the fish a chance to recover so that we can have the professional and recreational fishing that everyone wants”, says Eskil Erlandsson to Dagens Nyheter.