UiT professor reviews snow crab dispute around Svalbard

The European Union stopped issuing licences to catch snow crab on the shelf around Svalbard after Norway's Supreme Court ruled against a Latvian vessel, Irene V. Dahl wrote in Nordnorsk debatt on 2 November. Dahl is a professor at the Norwegian College of Fishery Science at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.

From 2017 to 2020 the EU issued 20 licences a year for snow crab in the Fisheries Protection Zone around Svalbard, she wrote. They came from Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Estonia and Spain. Norway answered with diplomacy and arrests. In 2017 fisheries minister Per Sandberg told EU fisheries commissioner Karmenu Vella that Norway would not give away a single crab, Dahl wrote.

Norway claims the crab because it lives on the seabed. In February 2019 the Supreme Court held that snow crab is a sedentary species, which falls under the coastal state's exclusive rights on the continental shelf. The case concerned the Senator, which the Coast Guard boarded on the Central Bank, inside the Svalbard zone, on 16 January 2017. It was fishing with a licence from Latvia.

In March 2023 the full Supreme Court ruled that the equal-treatment articles of the 1920 Svalbard Treaty stop at territorial waters. The EU and several states read the treaty as covering the zones Norway later gained under the law of the sea, Dahl wrote. The EU's fishing regulation for 2026 says the treaty "grants equal and non-discriminatory access to resources around Svalbard".

Dahl named two possible reasons for the EU's change. It may not have wanted its vessels arrested, and talks may serve its access to Barents Sea cod better. The EU's 2026 cod quota in Norwegian waters in the north is 9,196 tonnes. No treaty party has taken the question to an international court. A possible reason, she wrote, is that the question has no clear answer, and a loss could weaken a party in talks with Norway.

The EU's yearly fishing regulations still list 20 snow crab authorisations in Svalbard waters, in every year from 2017 to 2026. The 2026 text adds that catches should be consistent with "non-discriminatory management rules set by Norway".

The crab is fished by Norwegian vessels with a snow crab licence, partly in the Fisheries Protection Zone around Svalbard, according to the Institute of Marine Research. On 28 October the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries set the 2027 quota at 16,594 tonnes, up from 12,336 tonnes this year.

Dahl's piece is part of a UiT series on how changes in the EU may affect Norway.

Coverage: Nordnorsk debatt, Kyst og Fjord