With this legal action, we aim to put an end to ‘paper’ marine protected areas,” explains Nils Courcy, a lawyer with the NGO ClientEarth. The organization, along with Bloom, has announced that it is filing a complaint with the administrative court in Paris to prohibit trawling in the Mediterranean’s marine protected areas.
“In the Mediterranean, France is deliberately violating European law designed to protect the ocean and its carbon sinks by allowing trawling in ‘protected’ marine areas that host some of the most vulnerable ecosystems, such as seagrass beds, coral habitats, and maërl banks,” the associations state. To end this practice, they submitted a formal request in May to Hervé Berville, then Secretary of State for the Sea, asking him to amend three decrees that permit the use of trawling, dredging, and seine fishing in these areas to bring them into line with a European regulation from 2006. The request went unanswered.
“The fact remains,” the NGOs add, “that the government remains deaf to the issues of biodiversity protection and refuses to initiate any transition in the fishing sector, opting instead to maintain the status quo despite repeated calls from the scientific community to protect our ecosystems.” However, the government has not completely ignored the issue, as the Ministry of Agriculture is currently consulting the public on a draft decree that would close fishing for bottom trawlers beyond 800 meters deep in the Gulf of Lion and Corsica. Yet, this proposed regulation does not address all of the associations’ requests.
In July, the organizations also submitted an internal review request to the European Commission to revoke the trawling authorization for « gangui » type fishing granted to the French government above the Posidonia seagrass beds in French territorial waters adjacent to the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region.
Source: actu-environnement
