The Outlaw Ocean Report
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The Outlaw Ocean ii The Outlaw Ocean An Exploration of Policy Solutions to Address Illegal Fishing and Forced Labor in the Seafood Industry RESEARCH TEAMS IUU FISHING AND DATA POLICY Neil Nathan | MS Candidate, Earth Systems Hanna Payne | MA Candidate, Earth Systems Victor Xu | JD Candidate, Stanford Law School (SLS) IUU FISHING AND PORT ENTRY Laura Anderson | MA Candidate, Earth Systems Sadie Cwikiel | MS Candidate, Earth Systems Josheena Naggea | PhD Candidate, Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources FORCED LABOR IN FISHERIES Nahla Achi | MA Candidate, Earth Systems Natasha Batista | MS Candidate, Earth Systems Trudie Grattan | BS Candidate, Human Biology Katelyn Masket | JD Candidate, SLS RESEARCH ASSISTANTS Shalini Iyengar | JSM, Fellow in the Stanford Program in International Legal Studies, SLS Hai Jin Park | JSD Candidate, SLS, PH.D. Minor, Computer Science Xiao Wang | LLM, Stanford Law School TEACHING TEAM Janet Martinez | Senior Lecturer, Director of Gould Negotiation and Mediation Program, SLS Jim Leape | Co-Director, Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions (COS) Annie Brett | André Hoffmann Fellow, COS Kevin Chand | Early Career Law and Policy Fellow, COS; Lecturer, Stanford dschool Eric Hartge | Research Development Manager, COS PROJECT ADVISORS Luciana Herman | Lecturer & Policy Lab Program Director, SLS Proposed Citation: Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions (COS) and the Stanford Law School (SLS). “The Outlaw Ocean: An Exploration of Policy Solutions to Address Illegal Fishing and Forced Labor in the Seafood Industry,” COS, September 2020. Available at: https://oceansolutions. stanford.edu/outlaw-ocean-report and https://law.stanford.edu/courses/policy-practicum- the-outlaw-ocean/ iii The Outlaw Ocean ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The teaching team would like to thank the many people who contributed to the success of The Outlaw Ocean: Our students—Hanna Payne, Josheena Naggea, Katelyn Masket, Laura Anderson, Nahla Achi, Natasha Batista, Neil Nathan, Sadie Cwikiel, Trudie Grattan, Victor Xu—brought boundless energy and commitment to their research projects, far beyond any reasonable expectations for a two-credit class. We are grateful for their dedication to meeting the clients’ objectives and their resilience in dealing with all the kinks inherent to the first iteration of a class moved suddenly online. Luci Herman of Stanford Law School supported our early vision for this class and provided invaluable guidance throughout the development process. Tony Long of Global Fishing Watch was the client for the IUU projects and provided valuable insight and connections to the students. Jessie Brunner of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice and Elizabeth Selig of the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions, as the clients for the Forced Labor project, were a vital resource for the students, providing context and contacts in weekly check-ins. We are grateful to the extraordinary guest speakers who shared their perspectives with the students: Ian Urbina (The Outlaw Ocean Project), Xiao Wang (Stanford Law), Ambassador David Balton (Wilson Center), Susan Jackson (International Seafood Sustainability Foundation), Ame Sagiv (Humanity United), and Meg Caldwell, John Claussen, and Januar Putra (the David and Lucile Packard Foundation). A special thanks to Ian Urbina for allowing us to use “The Outlaw Ocean”—the title of his New York Times series and book—as the title for the class. Our legal assistants, Shalini Iyengar and Hai Jin Park, helped develop the research questions and were a resource to the students throughout the quarter. Thank you to Natalia Alayza for diligently vetting the Latin America legal analysis and conducting citation checks for the report. A tremendous thank you to Hanna Payne, who turned the papers into this report and told the story of the course, under the guidance of Nicole Kravec, head of communications for the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions. Finally, we want to thank the many people, too numerous to list here, who took the time out to speak with our students as they pursued their research. A full list of interviewees can be found in Appendix B. The Outlaw Ocean iv FOREWORD Largely out of sight, criminals pillage the oceans. They steal millions of tons of fish each year. That is a huge economic loss to coastal nations, estimated to be somewhere in the tens of billions of dollars. It is an even larger threat to food security; a billion people depend on fish as their source of protein, and in many of the countries that are most dependent, one fish in three is stolen. Illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing undermines governments’ efforts to manage their resources and undercuts the millions of fishers who are playing by the rules. IUU fishing is also a human rights crisis. The vessels that fish illegally often carry slaves. Hundreds of thousands of people are trapped on boats, facing wanton brutality. The Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions (COS) is working with the Friends of Ocean Action, convened by the World Economic Forum, to address these challenges. We are engaging governments, companies, and conservation and human rights groups to develop policy solutions for governments, such as measures to intercept illegal products at port, and to develop tools that enable companies to identify and address illegality or labor abuse in their supply chains. The Outlaw Ocean Policy Practicum at Stanford Law School allowed us to engage students from across the University and bring their formidable talents and energy to bear on solving these problems. Working with Luci Herman at Stanford Law School’s Law and Policy Lab, we developed a class that brought together students from law, human rights, environmental science, and policy. Over the course of the term, we heard from some of the world’s leading experts on these issues, representing a range of perspectives. And, in smaller groups, the students worked with clients to dive deep into specific challenges facing diverse stakeholders around data access, policymaking, compliance, and enforcement. Two groups of students worked on the challenge of IUU fishing—specifically, ensuring that illegal vessels have nowhere to land their catch. Their client was Global Fishing Watch (GFW), a nonprofit organization created by Google and Oceana, which has pioneered the use of satellite data to track fishing vessels on the water and help governments and others identify vessels that are fishing illegally. While GFW has been able to draw on global datasets that track the largest vessels, each fishing nation has its own vessel-tracking system that provides more granular data. The first student group investigated the legal precedents and challenges for enlisting governments to share those data with other governments and with the public. This team—Neil Nathan (MS ’20), Hanna Payne (MA ’20), and Victor Xu (JD ’20)—looked at Chile, Peru, and Ecuador as case studies to understand how each has approached the issue of data sharing, and the political and legal forces that have shaped their approaches. The second IUU group worked with GFW to come at this challenge from a different angle—to explore the possibilities for a system that rewards vessels that can demonstrate compliance with fishing regulations. Inspired by the Global Entry system familiar at airports, this team—Laura Anderson (MA ’20), Sadie Cwikiel (MS ’20), and Josheena Naggea (PhD candidate)—investigated how such a system could be developed within existing national and regional structures for port inspections. Examining port control systems in the Republic of the Marshall Islands and in Mauritius as case studies, they developed the framework for an Expedited Entry Port System v The Outlaw Ocean that could complement existing port controls and offer compelling incentives for vessels to be proactively transparent and compliant. A third group focused on the issue of forced labor. Their clients were the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions and the Stanford Center for Human Rights and International Justice, who are working with leading companies in the seafood sector to address human rights abuses at sea and in supply chains. This group—Natasha Batista (MS ’19), Katelyn Masket (JD ’21), Trudie Grattan (BS ’21), and Nahla Achi (MA ’20)—explored a key policy mechanism for tackling forced labor in fisheries: the International Labor Organization treaty known as C188. Through two case studies on Fiji and Indonesia, the students looked at how governments have translated the obligations of C188 into their national legislation and, more broadly, how they implemented fair labor practices in fisheries. They delved into the strengths and weaknesses of each country’s approach, including the promising points of intervention and obstacles to implementation. These are intricate and difficult questions. They took the students into domains that were new for most of them, and into the complexities of legal regimes and administration in multiple countries. Over the short span of the quarter, the students attacked these challenges with remarkable commitment and creativity, scouring public sources of information and interviewing a wide array of experts and actors. The resulting policy memos provide valuable insights into the lessons that can be drawn from the experiences of different countries, organizations, and actors and present innovative ideas for how those lessons can be applied. This report is an important contribution to the work of the clients and will be the foundation for a second edition of The Outlaw Ocean Policy Practicum. In the fall term of 2020, eight students will work with two clients to research pressing questions on issues of illegal fishing and forced labor, drawing on the work done by the spring 2020 cohort. On the IUU fishing side, the student team will continue the client partnership established in the Spring with GFW. On the forced labor side, students will partner with the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation, which brings together the top tuna processors in the world to advance sustainability in the tuna sector. Supported by the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions, students will also connect to a broad range of additional actors knowledgeable on these topics.