Update on high seas bottom trawling from Rainbow Warrior & UN meeting

High seas and New York, Wednesday 9 June 2004: Campaigners onboard the Rainbow Warrior on the high seas in the Tasman Sea have now identified five New Zealand fishing vessels active high seas around 350 miles off the coast of New Zealand on the Northwest Challenger Plateau.

In addition to the 3 vessels identified yesterday (1) the Rainbow Warrior has found two more, "Recovery II" and the "Tasman Viking" both owned by CR and DW Boote.

In New York today, a Greenpeace intervention was made today during the UN meeting on oceans issues in New York (2), regarding the documentation activities that the Rainbow Warrior has been doing on the high seas in the Tasman Sea. The intervention was made by Karen Sacks, a policy advisor for Greenpeace International. This intervention was made before the fifth vessel was identified this morning.

Video:

UN Intervention Text:

Further to the footage of the Greenpeace flagship shown earlier, the Rainbow Warrior has been in the international waters of the Tasman Sea documenting the activities of high seas bottom trawlers. In the course of the last 24 hours we have identified four vessels conducting unregulated high seas bottom trawling in that area.

As we speak, the rich biodiversity of the international area is being destroyed by unregulated fishing. We have witnessed by catch in the nets of three vessels which include shark and squid species (3).

The Rainbow Warrior is out on the high seas to document activity so as to clearly illustrate and highlight to the United Nations, the need for effective and concerted action by the international community – an immediate moratorium on high seas bottom trawling, so as to provide a "time out" during which a comprehensive scientific assessment can be made and effective legally binding regimes developed to conserve high seas biological diversity

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