January 27, 1976
Page 1181
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?
Mr. STEVENS. I yield.
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the Senator has accurately described the pending amendment as an instrument of those who oppose the bill to kill it by indirection because they know they do not have the votes to kill it directly. How else can anyone describe a complicated, cumbersome mechanism of this kind, which has been on the books since 1958, which never has been signed by the major fishing nations, which never has been utilized by any nation to trigger the protective devices that the treaty presumes to offer? How else could anyone describe this kind of amendment? If this amendment were adopted, it would be a fraud on the fishermen of our country.
Mr. CRANSTON. Mr. President, will the Senator yield?
Mr. MUSKIE. I should like to finish my thought. I have listened to the Senator at some length, and I will be happy to yield as soon as I finish my thought.
This is my considered opinion on this amendment. It offers nothing. As I understand it — I ask the Senator if I am correct — non-signatory nations of the 1958 treaty take nearly 100 percent of the fish within our shores. Am I correct?
Mr. STEVENS. The Senator is absolutely right. Thirty-five or thirty-seven of the nations — the Senator from Washington has the exact number — that participated in that Law of the Sea Conference have ratified this convention of 1958. None is a major distant water fishing nation. Specifically, Russia, Japan, and Poland — the ones giving us the major trouble — are not parties.
Mr. MUSKIE. Exactly. Russia, Japan, West Germany, Poland — all these countries that are fishing off the New England coast, that are decimating the fixed gear of our fishermen, all these countries that have not yet yielded up a single penny for the reimbursement of the damage caused. We are asked to go to a 1958 treaty, which never has protected anybody, as the source of relief to those people and their injured rights.
Mr. STEVENS. The Senator is absolutely correct.
Mr. MUSKIE. This is not a proven instrument. It has been lying around for 18 years, and it never occurred to anybody to use it as a means of protecting American fishing resources and American fishermen. Now, on the floor of the Senate, after 18 years of idleness, without ever having given protection to anybody, it is offered as the panacea and the answer to their problems.
Mr. STEVENS. Only last summer, in July of 1975, a gentleman who is in the legislative division of the Coast Guard wrote an article for the Journal of Maritime Law and Commerce. With regard to this convention, he said:
The Convention on Fishing and Conservation of the Living Resources of the High Seas, while it has been in force for the United States since March 1966, is a dead letter due to the lack of participation by major fishing nations.
Then he went on to say:
No enforcement machinery is established, however, to give the Convention teeth, a defect shared by the other 1958 Law of the Sea Conventions with the exception of hot pursuit in Article 23 of the Convention on the High Seas, a concept useful in other enforcement actions on the high seas.
The reason why it takes legislation to implement this is that there is no enforcement machinery in the 1958 convention. In this amendment, we are telling the President, the Secretary of Commerce, and the Secretary of State to take this action, but, "By the way, boys, when you fail, come back, because we have to pass this legislation before it can be effective."
Mr. MUSKIE. The interesting thing is that we have been urged to suspend action on this legislation because there is a Law of the Sea Conference that is going to enact an international agreement. We have been asked to rely upon that in all good faith and upon the assurance that it is going to produce a result. Apparently, those who have urged that point of view have so little faith in its prospects for success that they are asking us to accept the result of negotiations that concluded in 1958 and have never produced any relief.
I gather that no country injured by the kinds of actions we are seeking to deal with has ever sought protection under that treaty, because they know it would be fruitless. Now we are asked to
substitute that as a source of relief and as a greater assurance of relief, apparently, than the Law of the Sea Conference. I gather that the supporters of this amendment have been so impressed by our reluctance to rely on the Law of the Sea Conference that they are offering this as a better source of relief than the Law of the Sea Conference. If it is not, then what can it be other than an attempt to delay, to postpone relief, to complicate the process of seeking relief, and to obfuscate the result of what we do in the Senate and in Congress with respect to this problem?
I can see that Members might be tempted to go this route of international negotiations. Senator MAGNUSON has been around with international negotiations in this field longer than the rest of us. I can recall when I first came to the Senate 18 years ago watching his activities, meeting in international meetings in Japan, in the Far East, in Europe, in this country, producing agreements, treaties. I suspect that he had some oversight of or at least watched the proceedings that led to the 1958 agreement. None of them has worked.
Why else do Senators think this measure is before the Senate today? Because nothing else ever has worked, including the 1958 agreement. The sponsors now seek to persuade the Senate that by putting that agreement, which never has worked, into the pending legislation, somehow we give it new life and effectiveness. If it did not work outside the confines of this legislation, it is not going to work within its confines. It is as simple as that. It is offered for only one reason: To kill the whole effort, to kill the bill, to stop us in our tracks, to force American fishermen to wait another unspecified number of years pursuant one diplomatic route after another. Those who sponsor this proposal — or some other gimmick that may be devised by them — want to rely upon international agreements which have not produced, in all the years this problem has been growing, an iota of relief for our fishermen.
Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the RECORD the 1958 treaties that were entered into and the nations that ratified them, together with the footnotes that indicate why some of the nations did not ratify them. This certainly backs up what the Senator from Maine has said. The 1958 conventions failed so miserably that we are back at the Law of the Sea Conference again.
After negotiating for such a long period of time, it is interesting to note that many of the parties that negotiated in 1958 — incidentally, including our own Nation — refused to ratify the Protocol on Compulsory Dispute Settlements. It is not unknown for nations to be involved for years in negotiations and refuse to sign. Japan, for instance, negotiated and refused to sign the particular treaty that we are talking about right now.