EU's fishy digital certificate system leaves exporters floundering
- Reference: 1770205992
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/02/04/catch_eu_fishing_problems/
- Source link:
The European Commission introduced the [1]digital version of Catch on January 10, replacing equivalent paper systems, with the aim of tackling illegal fishing.
However, a [2]group of countries led by Spain say the digital system has "significant technical and legal shortcomings," including a lack of integration with customs control systems and countries outside the EU that use its certification scheme.
[3]
Speaking at the EU's meeting of agriculture and fisheries ministers in Brussels on January 26, Hilde Crevits, vice-minister-president of Belgium's Flemish government, said that January 10 "was too early to start."
[4]
[5]
The Catch system was holding up containers at ports including Antwerp and Zeebrugge, as well as at the UK border. "Fisheries products don't have a very long shelf life," she said through an official translator.
Crevits added that a related new regulation that requires captains to record the weights caught for each type of fish in a digital logbook is difficult in Belgian fishing grounds with 20 species: "You just try it."
[6]Norway's most powerful supercomputer will use waste heat to raise salmon
[7]Europe's cloud challenge: Building an Airbus for the digital age
[8]EU funds are flowing into spyware companies, and politicians are demanding answers
[9]EU member states pile pressure on Brussels for Chips Act rethink
One importer [10]told The Financial Times that it had dozens of shipping containers of fish stuck in Rotterdam in the Netherlands as the Catch system was only clearing about half of its shipments.
"We keep getting inexplicable error messages, server errors," an employee of the company told the newspaper, with the system not including all fish species and postal codes for all countries covered. The system also has size limits on uploading catch certificates from non-EU countries as PDFs, which the importer said were too low.
[11]
"The technical gaps and lack of interoperability with third parties risk paralysing the imports and logistics of our companies without adding any benefits," Marco Canaparo, Italy's deputy permanent representative, told the agriculture and fisheries meeting.
In response, a European Commission official said some issues had been caused by a shift from patchy national implementations of the previous paper-based versions. ®
Get our [12]Tech Resources
[1] https://oceans-and-fisheries.ec.europa.eu/news/new-digital-certification-system-tackle-illegal-fishing-2026-01-12_en
[2] https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-5587-2026-INIT/en/pdf
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aYN7ONrGNh2rd-GIfOdsKgAAAhA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aYN7ONrGNh2rd-GIfOdsKgAAAhA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aYN7ONrGNh2rd-GIfOdsKgAAAhA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/26/norway_salmon_super/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/29/europes_cloud_challenge_building_an/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/02/eu_spyware_funding/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/29/eu_chips_act_rethink/
[10] https://www.ft.com/content/53a977de-ddaf-4b2c-b19a-e2e08af38e0a
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aYN7ONrGNh2rd-GIfOdsKgAAAhA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
This is the space where consultancy firms live and collect a fortune for doing as little as possible and have specialized units focussing on blame shifting.
Outsource it to Capita. They'll do it for €600,000,000. It will be late, it won't work. But they'll do it.
Why cant I upvote this more than once?
Anyway you spelt crapita wrong
Maybe they did. My immediate reaction was to wonder which of the usual suspects was involved.
Something sounds fishy here...
It's bound to flounder...
Don't tell a sole.
Too late, the news is all over the plaice.
Floundering with no plaice for sole to hide after
deploying an AI Tur[d]bot ?
There's a plaice for these sort of jokes.
I have a solution:
Simply place a barcode on each fish......
It can be done with apples so why not fish? They just need to be encouraged to swim near an appropriate printer/laser/zapper to be barcoded.
Or better still if you prefer GM, modify the fish so the barcode is integrated from the start :)
The deity tried that with Zebra fish...
> "We keep getting inexplicable error messages, server errors," an employee of the company told the newspaper
Looks like they need to Catch their exceptions
Too many exceptions slipped through the net...
Not scaling well...
I was expecting a story
about the EU bureaucracy stuffing up a top level PKI Certificate Authority rather than some high tech version of a fishing licence. Still there is always next week.
Pivot to digital they said. It'll be fine they said.
If paper works, just use it.
Re: Pivot to digital they said. It'll be fine they said.
Except it doesn't because the problem of illegal fishing (in the eyes of the EU authorities) continued. Whether the digital system will be any better when the faults are fixed remains to be seen.
Ah, where Government & IT meet is too often the 'Death Zone' for multiple projects, over decades. You'd think lessons had b...no.
What will the intended system do? What do the users need - from the 'coalface' up? Build, make it as simple as possible, test x infinity. Release.