Conservationists take UK to court for ‘illegally squandering’ fish stocks
The UK government’s decision to set catch limits for fish populations above those recommended by scientific advice is to be challenged in the courts by marine conservationists who accuse ministers of breaking their own postBrexit rules.
The legal challenge, expected to start in January, will argue that the government is “illegally squandering” a public asset and going against laws aimed at improving sustainable fishing.
Every year, the UK, the EU and Norway negotiate catch limits for shared commercial fish species for the following year; they are advised by an independent scientific body as to what level is sustainable. This month, for the third year in a row, ministers agreed to set at least half of the catch limits for shared stocks above scientific advice. This means a green light for overfishing, according to the Blue Marine Foundation.
The deal for 2024, agreed by the UK, the EU and Norway, will result in 750,000 tonnes of fishing opportunities, worth £970m for the UK fleet.
Mark Spencer, the fisheries minister, said scientific advice had informed deals setting 70 catch limits for fish stocks in the North Sea and northeast Atlantic, in support of a “sustainable” and profitable fishing sector. But conservation and environmental law NGOs have criticised ministers from all the nations involved, warning many severely depleted fish populations remain at “grave risk”.
Charles Clover, co-founder of Blue Marine, said: “How long is the British public, the fishing industry or the Treasury meant to tolerate Defra ministers routinely, blithely and disingenuously breaking their own post-Brexit laws? Who is going to challenge them? Someone should and we are prepared to do so in the national interest.”
Blue Marine has written to ministers saying it will be seeking leave for judicial review of its determination of fishing opportunities for 2024, if these are in line with the government announcement on 8 December 2023.
When the government introduced the Fisheries Act, the first domestic fisheries legislation in four decades, it said it would create a “world class” management regime drawing on “best available science” to ensure fish populations are healthy and sustainable.
The reality is different, say conservationists. In the first year post Brexit, more than 65% of catch limits were in excess of independent scientific advice from the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (Ices). In the second year, they were 57% above.
This year a “provisional estimate” by Defra has found the same number of jointly managed stocks has been set in line with or lower than scientific
advice as last year – the third since the new regime came into place. Among the allocations were opportunities on stocks that scientists do not think should be fished at all, including two new at-risk species, Channel and Celtic
Seas pollack and Irish sea sole.
Last year the charity ClientEarth took EU ministers to court over the 2022 catch limits in the north-east Atlantic for shared fish populations between the EU and the UK as well as stocks in EU waters. The case is still pending.
A Defra spokesperson said: “Sustainability has been at the heart of the UK’s approach to support the viability of the UK fishing industry and catch limits have been set in line with obligations under the Fisheries Act 2020 and the Joint Fisheries Statement.
“During these negotiations we pushed for decisions to be based on the best available science to protect key stocks using evidence from Ices as the starting point.”
A European Commission spokesperson said it was important to reach “balanced and responsible” agreement and that scientific advice had been taken into account, alongside socioeconomic and other evidence, to justify catch levels “strictly limited to cover the needs of fisheries to continue operating at all”.
racist values throughout his life, he wrote disparagingly of the Indigenous peoples of the south of Tierra del Fuego, especially the Yaghan, who travelled in canoes between the islands and had an incredible ability to adapt to the most extreme conditions.
Darwin described them as “miserable degraded savages”. He wrote: “I could not have believed how wide was the difference between savage and civilised man: it is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal. He also wrote that “viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world”.
The marine biology scientific research centre at Estancia Harberton in Ushuaia, also known as the Museum at the End of the World, is noted for its collection of marine mammal skeletons
During the Beagle’s expedition, people from all over Tierra del Fuego were beginning to suffer persecution. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, they were massacred, especially by the military campaigns that aimed to dominate Patagonia.
Victor Vargas Filgueira from Ushuaia is a 52-year-old Yaghan and a survivor. According to the 2017 census, 1,600 people declared themselves Yaghan in Argentina.
According to Filgueira “the real story is not the one told”. He believes Darwin is one of those who collaborated to take his people “to a place of isolation, away from society, without rights, in a dehumanising process”.
His form of resistance is to tell his own story and that of his people, talking to the public daily, at the End of the World Museum.
Top: A life-size replica of Patagotitan (titan from Patagonia) the largest known dinosaur, at the Egidio Feruglio Museum in Trelew, Argentina. The lower picture shows Victor Vargas Filgueira a surviving member of the Yaghan Indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego
Filgueira says he tells “a story that makes us understand who we are – and I try to show people that we are talking about one of the most severe genocides of humanity”. He clings to an old parable to believe change is possible: “They will be surprised when the children of their children understand what they did not understand.”
According to Janet Owen, executive director of The Earth Museum, who explored the multisensory experiences of Darwin’s collections, Tierra del Fuego was where Darwin truly came alive. “Tierra del Fuego was the first place where this unknown comes in – the wonder, the strangeness, the excitement, the discoveries and perhaps the fear,” she says.
Owen says the trip “brought him to contact with a myriad of people, landscapes, languages, life-threatening situations, excitement, scientific observation”, which he spent the rest of his life analysing and drawing upon. “He brought his own worldviews, values, beliefs and prejudices into this mix from his imperial liberal, new science, male upbringing.”
Without Patagonia, she says, his deep thoughts about the bigger secrets of this world would not have been possible.
This story was supported by the National Geographic Society
A Darwin’s rhea (Rhea pennata) in the Maggiorino Borgatello Museum, in Punta Arenas, Chile. During his trip,
Darwin studied the differences between this species and its closest relative, the common rhea (Rhea americana)
Tierra del Fuego was the first place where this unknown comes in – the wonder, the discoveries and perhaps the fear
Janet Owen, The Earth Museum
of thousands of videos that had already been moderated. The policies we applied to these practice videos were compared with what had previously been applied to them by a more experienced moderator in order to find areas we needed to improve in. Everyone passed their probation.
One trend that is particularly hated by moderators are the “recaps”. These consist of a 15- to 60-second barrage of pictures, sometimes hundreds, shown as a super fast slideshow often with three to four pictures a second. We have to view every one of these photos for infractions.
If a video is 60 seconds long then the system will allocate us around 48 seconds to do this. We also have to check the video description, account bio and hashtags. Around the end of the school year or New Year’s Eve, when these sort of videos are popular, it becomes incredibly draining and also affects our stats.
Going live: ‘Some of the training was already out of date’
After we passed probation, we were moved on to the real queues. We quickly realised that some of the training we had received in the past months was already outdated due to policies being updated.
There are “live” queues where you moderate users streaming live. This is the most simple type of moderation with fewer policies … but it’s also where we often encounter the worst stuff and often there is little we can do except end the livestream or place restrictions on the user’s ability to upload and go live. Then there are “uploaded” video queues where the length can vary from a few seconds up to an hour.
In one queue you are presented with up to six videos from a user’s account and have to decide if the owner of the account is over or under 13 years old. In other queues you are presented with a single video and you have to apply relevant policies to any infractions you notice. In another queue you moderate comments.
If we have any doubts over what policies we should apply – a common problem due to near constant tweaks, additions and removals made to our policy guidelines – then we have a team of advisers. These are moderators who were promoted, have received extra training on policies and are made aware of forthcoming policy changes. They do a great job but we have seconds to apply these policies [and] it can take minutes, hours or days to get a response, particularly if it is a currently unfolding event such as a war or disaster.
Everything we do is tracked by our laptop, which locks after five minutes of no input. We moderate videos up to one hour long, so we have to wiggle the mouse every few minutes to prevent this happening. If the moderation software we use receives no input for 15 minutes, your status is automatically changed to “idle”. This can happen if your internet goes down or if you forget to change from moderation status to a meeting/lunch status.
All idles are logged, investigated and count against your performance review. You must report the circumstances of your idle to your team leader as well as explaining it in a dialogue box in the software.
We were hired to moderate in the English language and had to prove our proficiency as part of the recruitment process, but a huge amount of what we moderate isn’t in English. When this happens we are told to moderate what we see.
‘You have no control over what you receive’
In the video queue you have no control over what you receive. We are given 10 videos at once to moderate before submitting them all. A typical selection of the videos we receive would look like this:
Phishing and scam videos in a selection of foreign languages that promise guaranteed high-paying jobs at reputable companies and have instructions to send a CV to a Telegram account.
Sex workers trying to direct you to their OnlyFans and so on, while not being able to mention OnlyFans. They use a variety of slang terms and emojis to indicate they have an account on OnlyFans as well as instructions to “check their Instagram for more”, meaning that, while direct links to OnlyFans aren’t allowed on TikTok, by using the in-app feature that lets you open the user’s Instagram profile, the link is never more than a few clicks away.
A 10- to 60-minute “get ready with me” uploaded by an underage user where they dress and get ready for school.
A recap video featuring hundreds of photos and clips of an entire school year uploaded by someone who just finished their end-of-year exams.
Footage of well-known YouTubers’ and streamers’ most controversial moments, or popular TV shows such as South Park or Family Guy in the top half of the video and Subway Surfers/ Grand Theft Auto in the bottom half.
A four-minute explicit video of hardcore pornography.
Videos featuring what could be Islamist extremist militants but with little to no context because none of the text and spoken language is in a language you were hired to moderate or that you understand.
A first-hand recording of young men/teenagers using power tools to steal a selection of motorbikes/scooters/cars, followed by clips of them either driving the vehicles dangerously, destroying the vehicles or listing them for sale.
A recording of a livestream that happened on TikTok and has been reposted, probably because it contains controversial comments or behaviour.
A list of a person’s name, address, place of work and other personal information followed by harassing statements or requests for violence to be committed against the person.
You moderate these videos, submit them and then are instantly presented with 10 more. You do this all day. After lunch you move to the comments queue as a backlog has developed. You spend the rest of the afternoon sorting through threats, harassment, racism and innuendo.
TikTok declined to comment on the record. However, it insisted “moderator systems” do not shut down after five minutes, and it said it did not recognise the term “recaps”. In response to other stories about how the app is policed, it said: “These allegations about TikTok’s policies are wrong or based on misunderstandings, while the Guardian has not given us enough information about their other claims to investigate.”