The French Council of State has confirmed the need to ban fishing in the Bay of Biscay for four weeks in winter for boats over eight meters in length and without the derogations that the Government had initially authorized. The measure, which will take place from January 22 to February 20, 2025, It was also executed last year and once again it affects Spanish boats, since they will not be able to fish during those four weeks in these French waters.
In an opinion published this Monday, the highest administrative litigation body to which environmental defense associations had appealed, estimates that the four-week ban on that fishing area for vessels over eight meters It is an “adapted” measure for the protection of dolphins and porpoises.
The Council of State has ruled out extending this prohibition over time or extending it to other smaller fishing vessels, but it does ask that pelagic nets be added to the capture instruments that cannot be used.
These nets are one of those that also appear in the measure adopted by the European Commission to prevent fishing boats longer than eight meters, French or of other nationalities (in practice mainly Spanish), fish in the waters of the Bay of Biscay from January 22 to February 20, 2025.
In March 2023, the Council of State had already ordered the French Government to take measures to limit accidental catches of small cetaceans during fishing activities on the French Atlantic coast, from Brittany to the Spanish border. Thus, it was about complying with European Habitats regulations and that implied the temporary closure of fishing.
To apply this ruling, the French Ministry of the Sea published a decree on October 24 of that year that provided for the maintenance of this prohibition. for four weeks in the winter of 2024 and the same in 2025 and 2026, but with broad derogations for the period of 2024.
Faced with the appeal of environmental associations, who did not want these regulations to be repealed, the Council of State annulled them through the emergency procedurebefore ruling on the substance of the matter, which is what he has done now. Its justification is that the scientific observations that have been made during the time that this same measure was carried out in winter 2024 have revealed “a significant drop in the mortality of small cetaceans due to accidental capture.”
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