France detains UK trawler in English Channel as row over fishing licenses heats up
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The French authorities have detained a UK boat amid a dispute over fisheries. Paris warned it will sanction the UK subsequent week if London would not grant French trawlers extra licenses to function in its waters.
French maritime minister Annick Girardin mentioned the British trawler was escorted to Le Havre on Wednesday after being caught working with out a license within the Bay of Seine throughout the scallop fishing season. One other UK vessel acquired a verbal warning the identical day after initially failing to adjust to the test. Each boats have been fined.
The minister linked the incident to the “tightening of controls within the Channel within the context of the talks on licenses between the UK and the European Fee.”
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France warns it is going to slap UK with sanctions except spat over post-Brexit fishing is resolved
France and the UK have been preventing over fishing rights off the UK’s Channel Islands and the French coast.
Below the 2020 UK-EU commerce deal, French boats are allowed to proceed catching fish in British waters in the event that they get hold of a license. So as to take action, they should show they’d fished in the identical areas earlier than Brexit.
Nevertheless, Jersey, the most important of the Channel Islands and a self-governing dependency of the British Crown, has denied licenses to dozens of French boats, angering Paris, which argued that the apply was unacceptable below the phrases of the commerce deal. France threatened the UK with varied repercussions, even floating the choice of reducing energy to Jersey.
Jersey officers insist the licensing course of is suitable with present agreements, and the island’s fishermen have complained they haven’t been allowed to land their catches in France.
France warned it will tighten customs and sanitary controls on UK items arriving on its soil and ban UK ships from touchdown catches on French shores if the dispute was not resolved by November 2. It added that the second spherical of retaliatory measures would possibly embody sanctions “referring to the availability of electrical energy to the Channel Islands.”
“We is not going to let Britain wipe its ft on the Brexit settlement,” Gabriel Attal, a French authorities spokesperson, mentioned on Wednesday.
The UK authorities slammed the French sanctions as “disappointing and disproportionate,” and mentioned it is going to search “pressing clarification” of France’s response.
“We are going to take into account what additional motion is critical in that mild,” UK’s Brexit minister David Frost mentioned.
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