The 41st meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) was recently held in Australia, in which Argentina participates with strong claims over fishing activities south of the South Georgia Islands, which were illegally occupied by the United Kingdom. Argentina denounced that Britain granted permits to fish for toothfish without the necessary CCAMLR treaty, and sought international consensus against this measure.

It was the first meeting after two years of virtual negotiations between the 26 member states, the European Union and its 10 adherents. There, Argentina also highlighted its concurrent work with Chile to harmonize krill fishing in the north of the Antarctic Peninsula with the Marine Protected Areas project. In addition, he called for the protection of South Atlantic toothfish stocks, influenced by the UK’s unilateral decision to grant fishing permits in these disputed waters, something the CCAMLR regulations wanted to avoid (particularly fishing activities without first establishing protective measures to protect them). sea). biodiversity).

Guillermo Carmona, Secretary of the Malvinas, Antarctic and South Atlantic Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Argentina, stated that “what is currently happening with the tooth fishing in the south of the Georgia Islands is an episode that reflects the critical situation of CCAMLR as a multilateral level because we are facing flagrant violations of this mechanism by English”.

In line, the Director of Antarctic Foreign Policy, Fausto López Crozet, who also participated in the meeting in Australia, indicated that “all countries that are part of the CCAMLR system recognize its operations, within the system are islands belonging to France , others belonging to Australia . , the other being Norway and which all have sovereignty recognized by all members, each country can apply national regulations, whereas the only case where national measures cannot be applied is in the Georgian Islands in the South because there is no state sovereignty recognized by all which exists”.

López Crozet also pointed out that at CCAMLR “all decisions are made by consensus” and that “both Argentina and other countries understand that what the UK is doing is illegal fishing (given the previous situation) and we are sending the boat to the provisional list of illegal fishing, there is a procedure whereby we show that there was a level 3 offence, the most serious and the only ones objected to are the UK and Norway; but since decisions are by consensus only and they all have to agree, there are no sanctions against the UK”.

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