After years of investigations by non-governmental organization Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF), the government of Oman has removed the ISRAR fleet from its registry of fishing vessels due to its alleged involvement in illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.
The delisting was supported by EJF’s documentation of the fleet’s illegal fishing activities with Omani state officials, which found “the documentation submitted by owners about the previous history of the vessels was not satisfactory, together with all other evidence collected by all the fisheries departments involved.”
“The fleet did everything it could to avoid detection, including switching the flags it was sailing under; sailing under no flag at all for some time, which is itself illegal; changing vessel IDs while at sea; and making secretive transfers of crew, supplies. and fish out on the ocean, a practice known as transshipment,” EJF said.
This isn’t the first time the fleet has been caught and blacklisted. The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas blacklisted the fleet in 2021, and it was subsequently dropped from its insurance coverage. Then, in May, it was blacklisted by the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission, once again as the result of an investigation by the EJF.
The NGO said this time the ISRAR was only caught “due to a fortuitous observation of their movement patterns, which EJF’s investigators noticed appeared suspicious before launching a painstaking investigation into the fleet.”
The investigation involved authorities from eight nations across multiple continents, fisheries management organizations, the European Commission, and Interpol.