EU membership could shift Iceland’s fisheries control to Brussels

Three law professors at Reykjavik University have submitted an opinion on control over natural resources under European Union law, mbl.is reports. The 126-page document was commissioned by the Icelandic government and examines what could happen to Iceland’s fisheries management if the country joined the EU.

The professors are Gunnar Þór Pétursson, Hafsteinn Dan Kristjánsson and Margrét Einarsdóttir. The opinion notes that Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union does not rule out exemptions in accession agreements, including temporary or permanent exemptions from the founding treaties.

It cites several examples of special arrangements, some of them permanent, including Malta’s and Denmark’s restrictions on the purchase of holiday homes. The professors also stress that the fact that no country has requested a particular exemption does not mean that such an exemption would be impossible.

The professors describe the law as it stands, without predicting whether a special arrangement could be secured in negotiations. That question, the article argues, is political rather than legal and must be assessed by voters before negotiations begin.

The opinion states that if Iceland joined the EU’s common fisheries policy “without a special exemption”, decisions on the annual total allowable catch would move to the Council of the European Union. The council consists of ministers from the member states, and the EU would hold undivided authority over the matter.

Iceland would therefore have one voice among many when decisions were made about catches from its own waters.

The principle of relative stability would, under current conditions, mean that other member states would not receive allocations from local Icelandic fish stocks, since allocations are based on fishing history and other countries do not have that history. But that concerns the allocation itself, not control over the system.

Management of the fisheries and protection of fish stocks would move to Brussels. Relative stability is a management principle in practice, the article says, rather than a guarantee contained in the EU’s primary law.

That is why a majority of Alþingi’s Foreign Affairs Committee wants to “establish it even more firmly in an accession agreement” if membership negotiations take place. The article says this effort is itself the answer: what needs to be secured is not already guaranteed.

The special arrangement on which everything depends would require political support. The professors state that accession agreements are treaties under international law and that permanent exemptions must win political backing.

No country has ever requested an exemption from the EU’s common fisheries policy as a whole, so there is no precedent. The article says the arrangement Iceland would need is therefore not a legal right waiting at the negotiating table, but an unprecedented political outcome that would have to be achieved.

A minority of Alþingi’s Foreign Affairs Committee has also pointed out that the negotiating objective adopted in 2009, concerning control over shared fish stocks, is no longer being pursued.