Fifteen Nations Just Signed the Mombasa Declaration to End Illegal Fishing — What It Actually Commits Them To

On Wednesday, June 17, 2026, in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa, representatives from fifteen countries signed their names to a document that, on paper, looks unremarkable. There is no new court, no new fine, no new ship that will be seized as a direct result. What the Mombasa Declaration actually does is something quieter but potentially just as important: it commits its signatories to start telling the truth about who owns and operates the fishing vessels that work in their waters and under their flags. In an industry where illegal fishing is estimated to drain up to $50 billion from the global economy every year, that kind of basic transparency has historically been the exception rather than the rule.

The declaration was adopted at the 11th Our Ocean Conference, a major annual gathering focused on ocean policy that brought together representatives from more than thirty countries to Mombasa between June 16 and 18. Of those, fifteen nations spanning Africa, Asia, Europe, the Caribbean and the Pacific put their names to the agreement: Belgium, Cameroon, Chile, the Dominican Republic, France, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Republic of the Congo, Somalia and South Korea. Seven of those fifteen signatories are African nations, a detail that organizers and African officials themselves repeatedly highlighted as evidence that the continent is no longer simply a victim of illegal fishing but an active leader in writing the rules meant to stop it.

What Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing Actually Means

The declaration targets a problem known in policy circles by the acronym IUU, which stands for illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing. Each of those three words describes a slightly different kind of violation. Illegal fishing refers to vessels operating in clear breach of national or international law, often by fishing without a license or inside protected waters. Unreported fishing covers catches that are deliberately hidden or misrepresented to authorities, allowing vessels to exceed quotas without detection. Unregulated fishing describes activity that takes place in areas or by vessels not covered by any meaningful conservation or management framework at all, often in international waters where no single country has clear authority.

Together, these practices form one of the most persistent and damaging problems in global ocean governance. An estimated one in five fish consumed worldwide is linked to illegal fishing in some form, and the consequences extend well beyond depleted fish stocks. IUU fishing is closely associated with serious human rights abuses, including forced labor and human trafficking at sea, with an estimated 120,000 or more fishers currently trapped in conditions amounting to modern slavery aboard vessels operating with little outside scrutiny. The economic toll experts attach to the practice runs as high as $50 billion annually, a figure that captures not just the value of fish stolen from legitimate fishing economies but the broader damage done to marine ecosystems, coastal livelihoods and the credibility of fisheries management systems worldwide.

What the Declaration Actually Commits Countries To Do

Strip away the diplomatic language, and the Mombasa Declaration is fundamentally a transparency agreement. Signatory countries have committed to modernizing their vessel registries, publishing fishing authorizations, and strengthening the sharing of information about who owns fishing vessels, how they are licensed, and what they are actually doing once they are out at sea. The declaration builds directly on an existing framework known as the Global Charter for Fisheries Transparency, a set of ten policy principles, most of them low-cost or no-cost to implement, that outline concrete steps governments can take to make their fisheries sectors more visible and more accountable.

In practical terms, this means signatory nations are expected to build or improve digitized global vessel registry databases that make ownership information accessible rather than hidden behind shell companies and flag-of-convenience arrangements. It means assigning unique vessel identifiers, including for small-scale fishing boats that have traditionally been left out of formal tracking systems entirely. And it means sharing more of this information with international bodies, including the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, so that patterns of illegal activity can be identified and addressed across borders rather than treated as a purely domestic problem each country must solve on its own. As Amélie Giardini, global lead for fisheries transparency at the Environmental Justice Foundation, put it, trying to fight illegal fishing and the crimes connected to it without this kind of transparency means, in her words, literally chasing ghosts.

One of the declaration's more pointed commitments involves tracking down the actual beneficial owners profiting from vessels caught fishing illegally, rather than simply sanctioning the boat captain or the individual whose name happens to appear on a local registration document. This distinction matters enormously in practice. Illegal fishing operations frequently use complex corporate ownership structures and flags of convenience specifically to obscure who is truly financially responsible for a vessel's conduct, meaning that even when enforcement does happen, it often falls on the person easiest to find rather than the person actually accountable.

What Ghana's Fisheries Minister Said

Few officials made the human stakes of this agreement clearer than Ghana's Minister for Fisheries and Aquaculture, Emelia Arthur. Describing fish as something close to existential for her country, she noted that more than sixty percent of Ghana's animal protein comes from fish, and that roughly ten percent of the national population depends on the fisheries value chain for their livelihood. "In my country, our very existence depends on fish," Arthur said, adding that fisheries are a matter of culture and national security for Ghana, not merely an economic sector among many others.

Arthur welcomed Ghana's early adoption of the declaration as an opportunity for governments to unite around strengthening transparency and cooperation in fisheries, while also being candid about the scale of the challenge that remains. "We continue to wage war on IUU fishing," she said. "We have not won yet due to the lack of transparency." That admission, coming from a minister representing one of the declaration's earliest and most vocal supporters, captures the spirit in which the agreement was framed throughout the conference: not as a victory lap, but as a necessary and overdue first step toward a problem that has resisted easy solutions for decades.

How Enforcement and Satellite Tracking Will Actually Work

Transparency commitments only matter if they translate into the ability to actually see what is happening on the water, and this is where modern tracking technology enters the picture. Vessel tracking already relies on two main systems: the automatic identification system, commonly known as AIS, and vessel monitoring systems, or VMS, both of which broadcast a vessel's location and movement patterns to receivers on land or in orbit. When combined with satellite imagery and advanced data analytics, these systems can reveal not just where a vessel is, but whether its behavior, such as loitering in a particular pattern or switching off its tracking signal near a protected area, raises red flags worth investigating.

The scale of the visibility problem these tools are meant to address is significant. A 2024 study led by the nonprofit organization Global Fishing Watch and published in the journal Nature found that roughly seventy-five percent of industrial fishing activity does not appear in public tracking systems at all, meaning the vast majority of what happens on the water remains effectively invisible to regulators, researchers and the public. To help close that gap, Global Fishing Watch announced a new partnership with the Minderoo Foundation during the Mombasa conference to build what organizers describe as the first global map capturing both large industrial fishing fleets and the millions of small-scale artisanal vessels that have historically been left out of existing datasets entirely. That mapping project, expected to launch on July 1, 2026, is intended to give governments and fisheries managers a far more complete picture of activity at sea, including the so-called dark fleet of vessels that deliberately avoid detection.

Alongside the broader mapping initiative, Global Fishing Watch also announced more immediate, country-specific steps taken during the conference, including a new partnership with the government of Madagascar and an agreement with Panamanian fisheries authorities to publicly share vessel tracking data from Panama's domestic fishing fleet. These kinds of individual commitments, smaller in scale than the declaration itself, are arguably where the real test of the agreement's seriousness will play out, since a signed declaration only becomes meaningful once the data behind it is actually published, checked and acted upon.

A First Step, Not a Finish Line

It is worth being honest about the limitations of what was actually signed in Mombasa. The Mombasa Declaration is a voluntary political commitment, not a legally binding treaty, and it carries no automatic penalties for countries that sign on but fail to follow through. Notably, Senegal reportedly indicated early interest in joining but ultimately withdrew before the signing, while Chile and Gabon reportedly joined only at the last moment, illustrating just how difficult it remains to bring fishing nations to agreement even on relatively modest transparency commitments. Advocacy groups present in Mombasa were candid about this tension. Vera Coelho of Oceana Europe described the declaration as putting in place a roadmap toward improved transparency by 2028, while stressing that civil society and the international community now bear responsibility for holding signatory governments accountable to what they have promised.

That note of cautious realism extended to the conference's broader framing as well. Organizers and signatories alike were clear that the fifteen countries who signed in Mombasa are meant to be a starting point rather than a complete coalition, with more governments expected to join the initiative ahead of the next Our Ocean Conference in 2027. The inclusion of two European Union member states, Belgium and France, was specifically noted by observers as a potentially important signal that could encourage the wider European bloc to adopt similar transparency standards in the years ahead.

The Bottom Line

The Mombasa Declaration will not, by itself, end illegal fishing, and nobody who helped negotiate it claimed that it would. What it does represent is a rare moment of genuine, voluntary agreement among a diverse group of nations, spanning multiple continents and vastly different economic circumstances, that the secrecy long surrounding vessel ownership and fishing activity is no longer acceptable. For coastal communities in places like Ghana, where fish is not simply a commodity but a foundation of national life, that shift toward transparency carries real stakes. Whether the declaration's promises translate into actual published registries, functioning satellite tracking, and meaningful accountability for the people who profit from illegal fishing will depend on what happens in the months and years after the signing ceremony ends, not on the ceremony itself.

*This article is for informational purposes only. Data and quotes are sourced from the Associated Press, allAfrica, Inside Climate News, Global Fishing Watch, Phys.org, and Africa.com coverage of the 11th Our Ocean Conference.*