About the Gdansk Convention

The International Baltic Sea Fishery Commission was established pursuant to Article V of the Convention on Fishing and Conservation of the Living Resources in the Baltic Sea and the Belts (the Gdansk Convention) which was signed on the 13th September 1973.

On signing this Convention, the Contracting Parties recognised that they shared responsibility both for protecting the living marine resources of the Baltic Sea and for making rational use of such resources. The Convention area includes all waters from the baselines; the IBSFC is therefore not competent for the management of inland water resources.

It can be seen just how innovative this Convention was by remembering that it was actually signed before the start of the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea. The novel idea of an "Exclusive Economic Zone" had just been launched the same year, 1973, by a Declaration of the Organisation of African States.

The pattern of membership of the Commission changed following the accession of the European Economic Community to the Convention on the 18th March 1984, with the simultaneous withdrawal of Denmark and the Federal Republic of Germany. The unification of Germany in 1990 reduced the number of Contracting Parties to five. In 1992, the Republic of Estonia, the Republic of Latvia and the Republic of Lithuania acceded to the Convention. Finland and Sweden became members of the European Community on the 1st of January 1995 and consequently withdraw from the Convention.

Today, there are six Contracting Parties: Estonia, the European Community, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and the Russian Federation.

The IBSFC competence is defined as follows in Article 1 of the Convention: "The Contracting States shall co-operate closely with a view to preserving and increasing the living resources of the Baltic Sea and the Belts and obtaining the optimum yield, and, in particular to expanding and co-ordinating studies towards these ends,..."

The duty of the Commission is furthermore specified in Article IX: "to co-ordinate the management of the living resources in the Convention area by collecting, aggregating, analysing and disseminating statistical data, for example concerning catch, fishing effort, and other information."

The full text of the Gdansk Convention can be found under chapter "Documentation". If you want to know more about the work of the Commission, click on "Structure and Operation".