Coast Guard Region 2 safeguards maritime security, fights IUU fishing

Quang Nam (VNA) – Safeguarding maritime security and popularising the fight against illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing are among the main political tasks of the Coast Guard Region 2 Command, according to Colonel Le Huy Sinh, Secretary of its Party Committee and Political Commissar.

Every year, leaders of the force, which manages and protects the waters from Con Co island in the central province of Quang Tri to Cu Lao Xanh island in the south-central province of Binh Dinh and the East Sea, assigns subordinate units to educate fishermen on how to determine internal waters, baselines, territorial waters, contiguous zones, exclusive economic zones and continental shelves under the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Attention has been paid to updating local people on the current situation of security and safety of the country's sea and islands; and step up dissemination of basic contents of Vietnam’s Law of the Sea, the Law on the Vietnam Coast Guard, and legal provisions related to IUU fishing in various forms.

Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Hoang, head of Cua Dai Border Guard Station under Quang Nam province’s Border Guard, said that the best solution taken by his unit is to closely monitor ships with surveillance equipment so as to solve violations in foreign waters.

In order to combat IUU fishing, the unit focuses on managing the fleet and monitoring and inspecting fishing vessels’ activities when they enter or leave the port. As a result, for many years, in the area, there has been no case of staying uncontacted; sending equipment to other fishing vessels to profit from the State's petrol and oil support; or uninstalling monitoring devices for illegal fishing./.