27 July 2009
The recent conclusion of the long-running court case about fish landings in Newlyn, has brought the use the Serious Organised Crime Agency, for fisheries offences, into the spotlight.
The facts of the case are well known. A well established family firm pleaded guilty to landing over-quota fish in 2002. In addition to the usual court process, it was decided, by the soon-to-be-defunct Marine and Fisheries Agency, that in this and a number of other fisheries cases, legislation brought in to recover the ill-gotten gains of drugs barons and money laundering by terrorists – the Proceeds of Crime Act – should also be employed.
At the end of the proceedings the Court levied a fine of £45.
In the meantime the family had been traumatised by police raids on offices and home, and the livelihoods of a whole community stood in jeopardy, waiting for the impact of a confiscation order that initially began at £4 million – the amount that the firm was supposed to have benefited by the “proceeds of crime”. This was eventually reduced to £600K when it was conceded in court that the MFA and the Criminal Assets Recovery Agency had got its sums seriously wrong.
There is little doubt that if the Confiscation Order had been set towards the top end, that the firm wouldn’t have survived and Newlyn would have faced steep decline and a bleak future.
Most reasonable people would agree that there is something fundamentally wrong with using this heavy handed approach for fisheries offences, especially when there is wide agreement from the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit to the European Commission’s Green Paper on CFP reform, that in many regards, the CFP has been a dysfunctional system. This too was clearly the view of the case judge who, unlike the MFA and the Serious Organised Crime Agency, employed a sense of proportion.
A lot of time has passed – seven years – as the Court proceedings rolled to their eventual conclusion. In the meantime, misreporting of one kind of fish as another species to circumvent the complex and often perverse quota rules has been pretty well eradicated; the registration of buyers and sellers has extended legal liability beyond fishermen to the supply chain; the Cornish Fish Producers Organisation has shown (most clearly in the case of monkfish) that working collaboratively with fisheries scientists and through the political process with the NFFO and regional advisory councils, is a much surer, less risky and in the end a more productive way of dealing with the iniquities of the management system than circumventing the rules.
From time to time the judiciary are pilloried by the less reflective media for being out of touch with reality. In this case and another recently in the Republic of Ireland, it has been the judges that introduced common sense, a sense of proportion and fair play, when a gung-ho attitude has prevailed amongst the enforcement authorities.
Fishing is not terrorism. Fishermen should not be treated in the same way as Mr Big, sheltering from the law on the Costa Brava.
The judiciary have recognised this and this case sends an important message to the Government and to the enforcement authorities: Think again before using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.