International Baltic Sea Fishery Commission | |||||||||||||||||
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About the Gdansk Convention
The International Baltic Sea Fishery Commission
was established pursuant to Article V of the Convention on Fishing
and Conservation of the Living Resources in the Baltic Sea and
the Belts (the Gdansk Convention) which was signed on the 13th
September 1973.
On signing this Convention, the Contracting
Parties recognised that they shared responsibility both for protecting
the living marine resources of the Baltic Sea and for making rational
use of such resources. The Convention area includes all waters
from the baselines; the IBSFC is therefore not competent for the
management of inland water resources.
It can be seen just how innovative this Convention
was by remembering that it was actually signed before the start
of the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea. The novel idea
of an "Exclusive Economic Zone" had just been launched
the same year, 1973, by a Declaration of the Organisation of African
States.
The pattern of membership of the Commission
changed following the accession of the European Economic Community
to the Convention on the 18th March 1984, with the simultaneous
withdrawal of Denmark and the Federal Republic of Germany. The
unification of Germany in 1990 reduced the number of Contracting
Parties to five. In 1992, the Republic of Estonia, the Republic
of Latvia and the Republic of Lithuania acceded to the Convention.
Finland and Sweden became members of the European Community on
the 1st of January 1995 and consequently withdraw from the Convention.
Today, there are six Contracting Parties: Estonia,
the European Community, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and the Russian
Federation.
The IBSFC competence is defined as follows
in Article 1 of the Convention: "The Contracting States shall
co-operate closely with a view to preserving and increasing the
living resources of the Baltic Sea and the Belts and obtaining
the optimum yield, and, in particular to expanding and co-ordinating
studies towards these ends,..."
The duty of the Commission is furthermore specified
in Article IX: "to co-ordinate the management of the living
resources in the Convention area by collecting, aggregating, analysing
and disseminating statistical data, for example concerning catch,
fishing effort, and other information." The full text of the Gdansk Convention can be found under chapter "Documentation". If you want to know more about the work of the Commission, click on "Structure and Operation". |
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