Given the irreparable damage to both marine living resources and to
fishery-related livelihood, illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing should
be regarded as a transnational “serious crime.” Under the United Nations
Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, states should create
sanctions that explicitly identify illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing by
transnational syndicates as “serious crime” (requiring at least four years of
imprisonment) and invest additional state funding in monitoring and
enforcement of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. This Article
proposes a number of additional suggestions to strengthen the capacity of
domestic government networks, including characterizing illegal, unreported,
and unregulated fishing as a “serious crime” in national fisheries codes,
harmonizing criminal laws on illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing
across jurisdictions, creating concurrent extraterritorial jurisdiction over large-scale illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing crimes, and
authorizing states to acquire information about “beneficial owners” of illegal,
unreported, and unregulated vessels