Close your eyes and imagine a ship that’s engaged in illegal activity on the high seas. What flag is it flying? Maybe you’re picturing a black pirate flag billowing in the wind, its skull and crossbones announcing the captain’s wicked intentions to the world.
Or maybe it’s going incognito, flying an innocent-looking country’s flag to hide its true nature.
Every commercial and merchant vessel is required to register with a country and fly its flag under international law. That country is the vessel’s “flag state.” Like a passport, this establishes the ship’s nationality, legal identity, and the laws it must follow.
Each flag state is also responsible for controlling its fleet’s activities and enforcing environmental, safety, and labor regulations, making oversight from flag states a key line of defense against illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing worldwide. IUU fishing can include fishing without authorization, ignoring catch limits, operating in closed areas, targeting protected wildlife, and fishing with prohibited gear.
Enforcement of rules and regulations becomes more challenging when companies register their vessels in foreign countries that have lax oversight, a process known as “flags of convenience.” Lying in the shadow of these flags of convenience are a host of challenges for ocean conservation, human rights, and responsible fisheries management across the globe.
WHAT ARE FLAGS OF CONVENIENCE IN FISHING?
Not all registries are created equal. Some have lower registration costs and taxes, looser enforcement of regulations and labor standards, and minimal nationality requirements known as “open registries.”
Flag of convenience countries benefit from the economic investment that foreign vessels bring in. Companies register their vessels in these countries to save money, dodge domestic regulations, and access cheap foreign labor. As a result, flags of convenience are strongly correlated with IUU fishing activity and labor abuses at sea.
In 2024, a record number of vessels and their crews were abandoned at sea by vessel owners, resulting in unpaid wages and unsafe conditions. Workers are considered abandoned when shipowners cease communication with their crew at sea, fail to pay at least two months of wages, or neglect to supply essential supplies. Ninety percent of abandoned vessels in 2024 were flying flags of convenience.
Why is this allowed to happen?
While flagging vessels in foreign countries is legal, international law technically requires vessels to have a “genuine link” to their flag state through their crews, captains, or ownership. This requirement is vaguely defined and easy to dodge, and vessel owners frequently use shell companies and similar strategies to escape scrutiny.
PANAMA: A CASE STUDY IN FLAGS OF CONVENIENCE
Panama is one of the most infamous flag of convenience countries in the world. A recent study commissioned by Oceana estimated that, as of March 2024, 77% of Panama’s large-scale fishing fleet was legally owned by foreign entities. Looking at the global activity of Panama’s fishing vessels shows a fleet that operates far from home.
Oceana analyzed the 2024 activity of Panamanian-flagged fishing vessels* carrying Automatic Identification System (AIS) devices. Oceana’s analysis used public data from Global Fishing Watch (GFW)** – an independent nonprofit founded by Oceana in partnership with Google and SkyTruth. As not all vessels carry AIS, the analysis captures only a partial snapshot of the fleet’s activity.
While Panama’s visible fishing fleet appeared to fish*** for 30,152 hours worldwide in 2024, only 0.24% of that activity occurred within Panama’s own Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).**** Most of the fleet’s apparent fishing activity actually occurred on the high seas and in the EEZs of China and Vietnam, with 96% of the vessels recording zero apparent fishing activity in Panama’s EEZ. Only 3.1% of port visits by Panamanian fishing vessels were to Panamanian ports out of 1,433 apparent port visits. Together, these data show a fishing fleet with a global footprint, but minimal ties to their flag state.
In 2019, Panama received its second “yellow card” from the European Union for its failure to address IUU fishing. This yellow card serves a warning that threatens the country’s ability to export seafood to the EU market. How Panama responds could shape its access to global seafood markets and influence how flags of convenience are regulated worldwide.
WHERE WE GO FROM HERE
Flags of convenience are increasingly recognized as a critical battlefront in the global fight against IUU fishing. In June 2025, the United States’ House of Representatives introduced a bipartisan resolution condemning the use of flags of convenience.
But more needs to be done.
Oceana is calling on nations to stop the use of flags of convenience by fishing vessels, prevent fishing vessels from engaging in illegal fishing and associated crimes, and ensure accountability for the vessels that violate these rules, as recommended in the Global Charter for Fisheries Transparency.
There won’t always be a symbol as obvious as a pirate flag loudly proclaiming its intent to pillage and plunder. Some of the worst illegal fishing activities on the high seas are often hidden behind a seemingly innocuous flag.
Ownership transparency for fishing vessels is critical to strengthen accountability and prevent illicit activity by bad actors at sea. Flags of convenience hide an inconvenient truth. It’s time for governments across the globe to work together to unveil these cloaks of secrecy on our seas.
*Global Fishing Watch integrates data from over thirty registries with Automatic Identification System (AIS) data and the results of a machine learning model to create a dataset of vessel identity and characteristics for vessels carrying AIS.
**Global Fishing Watch, a provider of open data for use in this article, is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing ocean governance through increased transparency of human activity at sea. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors, which are not connected with or sponsored, endorsed or granted official status by Global Fishing Watch. By creating and publicly sharing map visualizations, data and analysis tools, Global Fishing Watch aims to enable scientific research and transform the way our ocean is managed. Global Fishing Watch’s public data was used in the production of this publication.
***Any and all references to “fishing” should be understood in the context of Global Fishing Watch’s fishing detection algorithm, which is a best effort to determine “apparent fishing effort” based on vessel speed and direction data from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) collected via satellites and terrestrial receivers. As AIS data varies in completeness, accuracy and quality, and the fishing detection algorithm is a statistical estimate of apparent fishing activity, therefore it is possible that some fishing effort is not identified and conversely, that some fishing effort identified is not fishing. For these reasons, GFW qualifies all designations of vessel fishing effort, including synonyms of the term “fishing effort,” such as “fishing” or “fishing activity,” as “apparent,” rather than certain. Any/all GFW information about “apparent fishing effort” should be considered an estimate and must be relied upon solely at your own risk. GFW is taking steps to make sure fishing effort designations are as accurate as possible.
****Global Fishing Watch uses Marine Regions’ definitions of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), which are defined by the provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
