"Indonesia wants illegal fishing listed as organized crime," 13 January 2019

When Indonesian authorities seized a notorious fishing boat...carrying 30 kilometers...of illegal gillnets,they found they had essentially caught a ghost.

The STS-50 had gone by other names in the past — Sea Breeze, Andrey Dolgov, STD No. 2, Aida — and flown the flags of eight separate countries on different occasions...

Its entry in Lloyd’s List Intelligence, the Facebook for commercial ships, features a nebulous web of companies, some registered in offshore tax havens, whose ownership is virtually impossible to determine.

Accountability for the vessel’s illegal fishing activities went no further than its Russian captain, who was fined just under $14,000 by an Indonesian court.

The case of the STS-50 is emblematic of the key obstacle in Indonesia’s otherwise robust fight against illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing, says Susi Pudjiastuti, the country’s...fisheries minister.

To target the corporate and beneficial owners of illegal fishing boats, Susi has called for an international consensus to include IUU fishing activities in the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC)... Activities currently recognized as transnational organized crimes under the convention include human trafficking, migrant smuggling, and gun trafficking.

Without formal recognition of its transnational nature, fishing crime can only be prosecuted in the jurisdiction in which it occurs, or, as in the case of STS-50, through cooperation via Interpol.