Spain – A progress report on a decade of combating IUU fishing - update

In our report “Spain – A progress report on a decade of combating IUU fishing”, we provided an overview of Spain’s implementation of the Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing Regulation, the IUU Regulation, between 2012 and 2019.
Through selected indicators, inter alia, the number of officials involved in controls, the number of inspections of third-country fishing vessels, and the refusals of catch
certificate validations, we highlighted the challenges, progress and shortcomings in preventing the entry of fishery products from IUU fishing into Spain.

We, therefore, made several recommendations to the European Commission (EC) and Spanish authorities, including the need to improve the quality of data provided in the biennial reports and to make them publicly available to interested stakeholders.

This report aims to update our previous work by focusing on Spain's implementation of the IUU Regulation between 2020 and 2021. Using the same indicators and information contained in the 2020/2021 biennial report, we highlight the main areas of progress and shortcomings and provide recommendations to the Spanish authorities and the European Commission.