Oceana reports 50 Spanish fishing vessels for disabling their geolocation systems
Press Release Date: December 4, 2025
Location: Madrid
Contact:
Irene Campmany | email: icampmany@oceana.org | tel.: +34 682 622 245
The organisation calls on Spain to strengthen monitoring and penalize this practice, which undermines transparency in the fishing sector
Operating a fishing vessel without an Automatic Identification System (AIS) is considered an infringement under European and Spanish law
Oceana has reported 50 fishing vessels to the Spanish Government for deliberately disabling their Automatic Identification System (AIS). This practice is prohibited for European fishing vessels unless there are security risks, such as piracy, as Oceana explains in its new analysis.
Despite the legal obligation to keep AIS on at all times for maritime safety reasons, AIS blackouts by EU fishing vessels remain frequent. However, to date, very few have resulted in penalties.
“For vessels flying the Spanish flag, disconnecting the AIS is a serious infringement that undermines transparency in the fishing sector. Spanish authorities should take a firm stance and crack down on these practices, which are unfortunately widespread and rarely sanctioned. Keeping the AIS geolocator switched on at all times is essential for the safety of fishers at sea, for states to know what is happening in their waters, and for civil society, as well as the countries where these vessels operate, to independently verify vessel behaviour,” says Ignacio Fresco Vanzini, policy advisor at Oceana in Europe.
This report is based on Oceana’s analysis using Global Fishing Watch data, which identified 464 Spanish fishing vessels that repeatedly disconnected their AIS between January and December 2024. In total, these vessels accumulated 132,420 hours without signal, with particularly serious cases where a single vessel was offline for more than 2,000 hours (83 days).
The report recalls that Spanish vessels over 15 metres in length are required to keep AIS continuously active, except in exceptional circumstances duly justified for safety reasons. Since last year, captains must also notify authorities in advance of any shutdown.
For all these reasons, Oceana urges the Spanish Government to:
- Investigate all unjustified AIS disconnections.
- Allocate sufficient resources to competent authorities to ensure they can identify and sanction non-compliance.
- Avoid relying solely on individual complaints to penalize these infringements.
- Improve coordination between maritime and fisheries authorities to share real-time information on AIS disconnections and request investigations and sanctions when appropriate.
The findings also show that critical areas where these disconnections are most frequent are concentrated in the Northeast Atlantic, particularly around Spain, Portugal, and France, with additional cases off the West African coast and in the Central Atlantic. In Iberian waters, some zones recorded significant accumulations, posing risks to maritime safety, transparency, and the ability to detect potential illegal activities. These patterns suggest that shutdowns occur not only in international waters but also in European waters, including areas of intense fishing activity and ecological importance.
AIS is a public system that automatically transmits a vessel’s identity, speed, and geographic position. Its main purpose is to improve maritime safety, reduce the risk of collisions between vessels, and keep ships locatable so emergency services can detect problems early. This geolocation system is also a tool to improve transparency in fisheries management and marine conservation.
Editorial notes:
- In 2023, Spain penalised 25 fishing vessels for deactivating their geolocation systems, thanks to an investigation by Oceana.
- You can read more about AIS systems here. Since January 2024, EU Member States must ensure that AIS data is made available to their competent authorities responsible for fisheries control.
- Global Fishing Watch is an international non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting ocean governance by increasing transparency of human activity at sea. The information and opinions presented here are those of the authors and do not represent or reflect the position of Global Fishing Watch. Through publicly available maps, data, and analysis tools, visualisations, data and analysis tools, Global Fishing Watch seeks to facilitate scientific research and transform the way the ocean is managed. Global Fishing Watch’s public data was used in the preparation of this publication. Any reference to “fishing” should be interpreted in the context of Global Fishing Watch’s fishing detection algorithm, which is an effort to estimate “apparent fishing effort” based on the speed and heading of vessels recorded by the Automatic Identification System (AIS), collected via satellites and land-based receivers. AIS data can vary in accuracy and coverage. The fishing detection algorithm estimates apparent fishing activity, so some activities may be missed or misidentified. For these reasons, Global Fishing Watch qualifies all vessel fishing effort designations, including synonyms for the term ‘fishing effort’ such as “fishing” or ‘fishing activity,’ as “apparent” and not certain. All GFW information on “apparent fishing effort” should be considered an estimate and used at your own risk. GFW is implementing measures to ensure that fishing effort designations are as accurate as possible.
