The role of human rights in implementing socially responsible seafood

Abstract

Sustainability standards for seafood mainly address environmental performance criteria and are less concerned with the welfare of fisheries workers who produce the seafood. Yet human rights violations such as slavery and human trafficking are widespread in fisheries around the world, and underscore the need for certification bodies and other seafood supply chain actors to improve social performance, in addition to addressing environmental challenges. Calls for socially responsible seafood have referenced human rights law and policy frameworks to shape the guiding principles of socially responsible seafood and to provide the legal machinery to implement these aspirations, but practical guidance on how to achieve this is lacking. To provide clarity on this challenge, we reviewed the literature concerning human rights in the seafood supply chain, and prepared an analysis of opportunities and challenges to implement socially responsible seafood through relevant human rights, legal and policy instruments. We observe that human rights laws are generally framed in favour of addressing violations of civil and political rights, but there remains considerable scope for applying economic, social and cultural (ESC) rights in this context. Other challenges include weakly defined ESC rights infringements, a lack of straightforward mechanisms to enforce human rights entitlements, and practical difficulties such as resources to support and secure rights. On the positive side, governments can draw on international instruments to inspire national policies and legislation to eliminate illegalities from the seafood supply chain. However, for socially responsible seafood principles to translate into tangible actions, these objectives must be rooted in clear legal obligations and be supported by sufficient national capacity and political will.

The Intersection Between Illegal Fishing, Crimes at Sea, and Social Well-Being

“…The consequences and severity of illegal fishing, associated fisheries crimes, and organized crime that occurs on the sea are severe (Tickler et al, 2018;Moreto et al, 2019;Teh et al, 2019). While we present the argument that marine business models are discrete, there are numerous examples of leaders and experts conflating these issues (Witbooi et al, 2020).…”

Editorial: Illegal Fishing as a Trans-National Crime

“…Illegal fishing negatively impact fish stocks (Le Gallic and Cox, 2006) and ecosystems (Pascoe et al, 2008), including through overharvesting and prohibited gear usage, with increased risk of stock collapse and species extinction, reshaped marine food webs, and reduction of climate resilience for both fish stocks and fishing communities (Konar et al, 2019). Fish stocks overexploitation increase fishing costs, poverty among small-scale fishers, and human rights abuses including slavery aboard ships become more common (Kittinger et al, 2017;Tickler et al, 2018;Teh et al, 2019). Societal and economic losses are far reaching, as IUU fishing results in loss of employment (Daniels et al, 2016), and economic opportunity (Agnew et al, 2009), loss of income and tax revenue (Konar et al, 2019), and international maritime conflicts (OECD, 2004;Sumaila and Bawumia, 2014;Pomeroy et al, 2016;Standing, 2017;Belhabib et al, 2019;Spijkers et al, 2019).…”

Human Rights Pathways to Just Sustainabilities

“…Studies on the impact of human rights in areas relevant to sustainability include food [83][84][85], water and sanitation [86][87][88], environmental protection [89,90], climate change [91] indigenous rights [92,93], business [79,93], and livelihoods [94]. Human rights offer a meaningful way to link indicators of sustainability across the social and environmental pillars, as suggested by Murphy [19].…”

“…Political shifts can be particularly dangerous when not confronted with strong legal boundaries, in that they can quickly undo years of work to protect fragile ecosystems (See for example [129]). Nevertheless, human rights place tall hurdles on unsustainable pathways and could effectively be strengthened [85], as well as extended to include the rights of nature itself [128,130]. Sustainability scientists can play a vital role by calling for stronger human rights protections where they pertain to socioecological systems.…”