Note by Mr Elliot Morley, MP, Minister
for Fisheries, Water and Nature Protection
I should like to make some observations concerning
my session with the Committee on 5 February. It is desirable that
these should be included as part of my evidence in order to ensure
that there is clarity on the points at issue.
My comments concern my exchanges with Richard
Bacon on that occasion, and arise from a specific point about
the provenance of the report from which he quoted during the session.
I understood him to say that he was quoting from a Defra report,
however on checking I find that the quoted passages actually came
from the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs'
November 2002 report on the Reform of the CFP, where they figure
as part of the views of an individual respondent to their public
consultation which are appended to that report.
I should therefore like it to be clear that
the implicit attribution of these views to Defra is not correct.
There are two points I need to add in the light
of this, stemming from the fact that I was not, as I understood
at the time, being asked to confirm the accuracy of statements
in a Defra report.
The first concerns the question of what percentage
of the "European pond" is contributed by the UK's waters
out to 200 miles. No trace can be found in Defra of this figure
ever being calculated. To compute it would actually be a huge
and complex calculation. Given the marginal relevance of these
figures, which I pointed out during my session with you, I have
to say that I could not justify putting this work in hand.
The second point concerns the correctness of
the statement (which is not, I repeat, a statement by Defra) that
"it is lawful to take back national control over the 200-mile
[median] line limit which is acknowledged as being under British
and not EU control by the United Nations Convention on the law
of the Sea".
It is true to say, as a matter of international
law, that the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea recognises the
rights of coastal states. But (and this is what I was referring
to in my remarks to the Commitee) this is subject to the qualification
that Annex IX to the Convention recognises the Community as an
international organisation whose members are capable of ceding
competence to it, as in fact we have done in relation to the conservation
and management of sea fishing resources. I should add that any
suggestion that we have a right to assert our control against
the EU involves ignoring the fact that EU law is a free-standing
system which embraces both domestic and international law in the
matters in which the EU institutions are competent. In that respect
withdrawing from the CFP would require a Treaty change and could
not be achieved under UK law alone.
9 April 2003
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