Proposal for a Council Decision on the submission by the European Union of an amendment of Appendix III to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES)

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) is implemented in the European Union by Council Regulation (EC) No 338/97 of 9 December 1996.

The species Lamna nasus (porbeagle) is very vulnerable to fishing pressure due to its low productivity. It has been experiencing steep decline in the North Atlantic over the last decades, especially in the North East Atlantic, which led the Union to prohibit fishing for this species. This prohibition applies to Union vessels as well as to foreign-flagged vessels carrying out their activities in Union waters. Exploitation of stocks in other oceans of the Southern Hemisphere is largely unmanaged and unlikely to be sustainable.

As the Union considered that the species may become threatened globally with extinction unless international trade is subject to strict regulation in order to avoid utilisation incompatible with its survival, it proposed its inclusion into CITES Appendix II at CITES CoP14 (2007) and CoP15 (2010). Those proposals did not reach the 2/3 thresholds of the Parties required under the CITES Convention for their adoption. As there is no evidence of a recovery of the species, and in the absence of international regime designed to ensure its management and conservation in all its area of repartition, further action by the Union is needed to protect the species.

It is believed that international trade has been playing a considerable role in driving the overexploitation of porbeagle. There are currently no internationally-agreed specific data on trade in porbeagle specimens and gathering such trade data is necessary to assess the impact of international trade on the conservation of the species. With a view to fostering international cooperation for the control of trade in specimens of the Lamna nasus species and a better protection of the species, it should be included in Appendix III to the CITES Convention by all Member States.

In such circumstances a Union decision to include Lamna nasus in Appendix III to the CITES Convention should be expressed by the Member States acting jointly in the interest of the Union in a manner consistent with the requirement of unity in the external representation of the Union. The joint submission for inclusion of Lamna nasus in Appendix III to the CITES Convention should therefore be sent to the CITES Secretariat by the Member State holding the Presidency of the Council of the European Union acting as a representative of the Member States.

• Primary Source

EUR-Lex: COM(2012)044: Follow the progress of this document through the decision-making procedure http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/HIS/?uri=COM:2012:044:FIN

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