Global Charter for Fisheries Transparency information: EIR release

Information requested

We are seeking to establish a UK wide understanding of sanctioning and enforcement activity - and its transparency - so I am wondering, can you share with us the central register of fisheries / fishing penalties, or any register you hold of fisheries enforcement and compliance activities and outcomes?

Within any data you share, can you please include the category/type of offence or breach, the level or nature of any sanction (where this has concluded), length of vessel, PLN (noting this is not personal protected data), flag of vessel, home port and name of business (please redact this in cases where you consider it to be protected data) covering the period from January 2022 to the present day?

Response

As the information you have requested is ‘environmental information’ for the purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs), we are required to deal with your request under those Regulations. We are applying the exemption at section 39(2) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA), so that we do not also have to deal with your request under FOISA.

This exemption is subject to the ‘public interest test’. Therefore, taking account of all the circumstances of this case, we have considered if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exemption, because there is no public interest in dealing with the same request under two different regimes. This is essentially a technical point and has no material effect on the outcome of your request.

I enclose a copy of most of the information you requested, “Infringements Coastal for Release and Infringements Marine for Release”. Annex A contains a list of the infringement codes and their description as used by the Marine Directorate.

While our aim is to provide information wherever possible. However in this instance we are unable to provide some of the information you have requested because an exception under regulation 10(4)(e) of the EIRS (internal communications) applies to some of the information.

We consider the infringement database as an internal document, however our aim is to be open and transparent whilst protecting the public and so we are releasing extracts from our infringement database without any vessel identifiers. This is subject to the public interest test, whilst we understand the public might have an interest in this information we do not consider it in the public interest to release details of offences which may be used against individuals without them having the rights of a defence.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

EIR 202500482139 - Information released - Attachments

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