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This report exposes the alarming environmental and human rights toll of China’s distant-water squid fleet in the Southeast Pacific. It draws on investigations that reveal widespread shark finning, marine mammal capture, abusive labour practices, and the unloading of deceased crew into Latin American ports. The report also highlights major governance failures: despite early warnings of a decline in the squid population, and calls for urgent reforms to end IUU fishing and forced labour in the world’s most important squid fishery.

Watch the webinar where we discuss the findings of this report with experts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

This letter urges European Commissioner for Fisheries and Oceans Costas Kadis to stick to his commitments to focus on the “gradual but timely and full implementation of the revised fisheries control system”, which includes CATCH and the Fisheries Control Regulation, to deliver on Europe’s zero-tolerance to illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.

Illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) and unsustainable fishing places immense pressure on the world’s oceans. These destructive practices go hand in hand with human rights violations and labour abuses. A major challenge in effectively tackling these issues is that much of this harmful activity occurs in the middle of the ocean, where it is easier to avoid detection.

The findings of this report show that the adoption of fleet-wide CCTV, as a key tool within broader monitoring, control and surveillance systems, has massive potential to enhance transparency, tackle IUU fishing, and address human rights abuses at sea.

This briefing details EJF’s ongoing observations and analysis of the Government of Indonesia's (GOI) monitoring, control, and surveillance (MCS) mechanisms, aimed at detecting, investigating, and prosecuting incidences of IUU fishing, as well as associated human rights abuses, forced labour, and human trafficking. It provides comprehensive recommendations for GOI agencies to address identified gaps within these mechanisms, focusing on issues arising during both at-sea patrols and port-side vessel inspections. Additional fisheries regulatory analysis highlights gaps in implementation and law enforcement.

The EU may have the world’s most comprehensive import control scheme on paper, but this briefing demonstrates that weak and uneven implementation of import controls by Member States is leaving room for products of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing to enter the EU market.

Hundreds of distant-water vessels are plundering squid populations in the Southwest Atlantic, driving a keystone species towards collapse and exposing workers to horrific abuses.

This brief updates EJF’s report Levelling The Playing Field: Assessing the impact of Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs) in Liberia’s coastal communities, which was published in 2024. The report assessed the impact of VSLAs on increasing women's participation in small-scale fisheries (SSF) decision- making processes and evaluated the effectiveness of VSLAs as a tool for empowering members of fishing communities.