 The reason we're having this issue briefing on illegal fishing is because the forum has done a significant amount of work with our stakeholders on introducing technology, working to introduce technology between business government and civil society on tracking fish stocks and managing the illegal fishing challenge, which is a huge issue. Illegal un-reported and unregulated fishing represents theft of around 26 million tonnes or 26 billion dollars of value of seafood a year. It's a hugely challenging issue that runs across the supply chain. Today we will have a perspective from Timor Leste, from a minister who has a deep understanding of illegal fishing issues in Southeast Asia and how governments and business are working together to solve that, and from Peter's perspective on the challenges of human trafficking in the illegal fishing industry. With that I'll hand over to Minister De Silva for some statements on this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having us here. And then the issue, the illegal fishing is a global issue. In all days when resources from the earth is getting scarce, we turn into sea. That's why we have, last year I took part in an international meeting on the blue economy and then next month I'll travel to, with my colleague, Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of Environment, we'll go to Newark for a conference, also an international conference on the blue ocean and blue economy, which is very important. So it's an issue of a great importance for Timor Leste because Timor Leste is an island. Not only this, and then we lie between the Indian and Pacific Ocean. Apart from this, and the most important thing is that in Timor Leste we lie in a region in the what we call the Triangle of Baha'i Biodiversity. So any, the illegal fishing activities will endanger the species, will endanger what we've seen, it can be seen as a world heritage, what we need to protect and what everyone, and then also because of the climatic changes, some tough action needs to be taken in order for us to protect those species. Not only some of them are in danger, but also we need to protect the resources for our own people and for human consumption. In terms of, for Timor Leste is very important as the protein intake in Timor Leste is one of the issue, so we need to do it. So what we have in Timor Leste, we promote sustainable fishing. We have done, we carried out several studies, coastal studies, coastal fisheries, and then also we promote sustainable fishing. Our fishing policy is very clear that we do fish, but we do fishing, we promote fishing, but fishing has to be done in such a way not to deplete the resources. And that's why our legal framework in Timor Leste is very tough. We don't, anyone who wants to invest in fishing industry, as we currently have already, a hundred million dollars investment of industrial fishing that already started last year, they are not, they don't, they're not only fish in the high sea in Timor Leste's water, but also they are going to do what we call, what is known as open sea aquaculture or mariculture. Apart from that, they also do prawn farming. But in regard to the fishing, anyone who wants to, because we are mindful of what could happen, whoever wants to fish in Timor have to fulfill some prerequisite. First of all, you have to submit, ask for how many, we do license, our license is, is renewable every year. You don't have license for five years. So any license can be terminated if they are found, they are caught violating our regulation. The regulations cover the amount of fish they're allowed to take. Yes, the amount of fish and what you call the accompany catch. So if they fish tuna, they are allowed to fish only 10% of other species. If they are caught fishing over this, they will be penalized. If they fish the protected spaces, we give them only first, second, 30s to get out of Timor Leste. Last year, or the year before last year, I did it myself. I canceled two fishing vessels from Sri Lanka. They went there to fish shark instead of fishing tuna and other pelagic species. We gave them the first one, the second one, the third one to get out of Timor Leste. And I have no, we don't sell our resources, our sovereignty, and this is very important. We got them out. So our regulation is very tough. Any fishing vessel, they have to submit the fishing vessel and we verify the fishing vessel where, when it was, what do you call it, the registration, when it was manufactured, which year? And then the registration and where they have been fishing. And to do so, we cross check it. We have a very good network. We cross check all the vessels, your data. And we send it to our neighbors, Indonesia, Australia, and PNG. Then once it is clear, they can bring the fishing vessel to Timor Leste and the fishing vessel is checked, inspected. And then every fishing equipment will be inspected, one by one. But we don't do it ourselves. We ask for Australia and Indonesia and PNG to help. Last time, they are still not sent to official to help us inspect the fishing. And then they are outrised to use a certain fishing device. Trolling is not allowed. Drifting net is not allowed. If they are caught to use it, they will be heavily penalized. The penalty is from $500,000 to $500,000. How well coordinated across the region do you feel fishing as an industry is? Oh, we coordinate. We have signed an MOU in Indonesia, organized by Minister Susi. And we are about to, we may, we will meet soon, to go into practical aspect of implementing this MOU. We also work very closely with Australia. As a matter of fact, we have our resources, Australia is willing to provide us with the resources to control legal fishing, as well as China also already promised. And Indonesia said that they can help. But above all, we have a launch in Timor Leste. Now in Timor Leste, not only Timor Leste, Timor Leste, Australia, PNG, Indonesia, we have what we call Arafura Timor Sea Forum. I'm one of the founding members. We also signed the PMC, it's a South China Sea, something on fisheries. I went to Hainan province in 2005 to sign that agreement. And then, apart from this, we have ratified FIO conventions on fishing. So all this has been adopted and we work very closely with Indonesia. And then we check the company profile. And the company profile is sent to Indonesia, Australia, PNG, and Indonesia. If they are called to fishing illegally, they are not allowed to fish in Timor Leste. And this is where we are. And then, of course, illegal fishing in Timor Leste, in Arafura Timor Sea, and in Timor Sea itself, we have been robbed or say, by the illegal fishing. Now the legal fishing activity is diminishing now, because we have our presence in the sea with those 15 fishing boats. Now we increase it to 17. We are very cautious. We don't give too many licenses and we don't expect to give too many licenses because we are mindful of the legal fishing activities. There is another aspect of our regulation. Transshipment is not allowed. Every fishing boat that left the port, they have to come back within a certain period of time. And within a certain period of time, when they come back, the boat will be inspected and the catch will be inspected as well. So there are some of the measures we have taken to combat illegal fishing. But of course, it's still a very young country. We don't have enough resources to fully control illegal fishing activities. But we are doing our best. At the moment, we have a cooperation, close cooperation with Japan, particularly through Jaike, in which give us access how we can more monitor those vessels that are fishing in Timor Leste Sea. We have around 75,000 square kilometers of fishing. And then they can only fish 10 miles off the coast, industrial fishing. 10 miles through the coast, it's only for traditional fishing. And they are not allowed to fish in the northern coast. It's only for coastal fishing. So we've done things in a such a way that will protect not only our coastal fisheries, but also in order to minimize the impact of intensive fishing and depleting our resources. We still have some spaces within some areas already being extinguished like Nautilus. We have lots of Nautilus in Timor Leste. I'd like to bring in our other participant, Peter, on the human trafficking aspects of the fishing industry. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the things that your organization is working to achieve in this space? Thanks, Mike. And let me first just congratulate the World Economic Forum on the leadership that's been shown towards addressing this issue of illegal fishing. I think the multi-stakeholder effort is so important for this issue globally. And also it's gratifying to have the minister here who really represents the power of government to enforce laws to protect the environment in their countries and also to protect the economy. I would say that where you have environmental degradation, often it's a result of a failure to enforce laws. And that situation actually is exactly the same environment. The lawless environment is one that is conducive to slavery. And so you often find the confluence of the two, that they're intricately interwoven, that you find where you have environmental degradation, where you have the exploitation of the environment, the exploitation of people follows. And likewise where you find slaves in the world today, you often find the degradation of the environment. And the common denominator, the common thing that's there is a lack of enforcement of law. And so IJM's mission around the world is to protect the poor from violence. And a lot of our work is to counter trafficking and human trafficking. We do that by identifying individual cases, working collaboratively with governments to bring rescue and restoration to victims of trafficking, but also to prosecute those that actually perpetrate this crime, this crime of human trafficking. And as we do that, we're able to work alongside justice systems to build up their own and strengthen their own response to the crime. And the confluence of the environmental degradation and the degradation of human rights is just a space in which there's huge potential, I think, for coming together on this issue from both perspectives. And so what we have seen as we've addressed this crime here in Cambodia, in a relatively new project, protecting Cambodians from the scourge of labour trafficking in the region, and also a new project in Thailand and Bangkok, which is directly focused on the fishing industry in Thailand. So what we've found is that we can have partnerships with private sectors who are engaged in the legal fishing response and actually work together to strengthen law enforcement. And that's the key. That's the coin of the realm. That's really what needs to happen. The technology can be used to track ships. It can be used to track fishery products. The work can be done to enforce regulations and laws on fishing vessels and ship captains. But that effort and that significant investment of resources will itself be denuded, will be undermined if you cannot consistently bring to account in criminal justice systems those that are actually perpetrating violence against the migrant fishermen that tend to find themselves on these vessels. And so what we find is that in a typical case, you know, you'll have a subsistence farmer somewhere in Cambodia or Myanmar or many other countries in the region looking for opportunities overseas. They're enticed overseas with the offer of good pay and a job not on a fishing boat, because actually the word has got out. Don't work on the fishing boats. But the broker will tell them you don't have to do that. We'll just work on the ports. And they'll get there and they'll be taken across into these ports and places like Thailand where they're actually sold, physically sold, from broker to ship captain. And it's not until maybe they're 200 miles offshore that they actually realise the truth of what's happened to them. And they're on these large fishing vessels out on the high seas. It's a situation where they are really beyond the scope and reach of the law. And so if you can imagine a situation of abuse where you're working 17 to 22 hour days where, you know, you're often forced to take drugs so you can actually keep working, where if you fall sick there's no medical treatment. If you fall overboard the ship captain is likely just to keep on sailing. You know, more than half, the UN study showed more than half of fishermen in some of these industries have witnessed the murder of one of their crewmates by a ship captain. So there's a huge amount of violence. And the economic pressures are there. The connection with the environment is that as these ships have to go further and further afield to find catch, they're further away from the protections of a law that might be in these countries. But also there's a huge amount of pressure to profit. And so 17 hour days are the norm to force these men to work hard on these ships and degrading and completely slave-like conditions essentially. Which they can just never escape from. There's no one to rescue them. There's no one to come and save them. And if we can just imagine that, there's a situation of a lack of any legal protection. And that's just a situation of abject hopelessness for someone on a ship like that. And so really that's where IJM is passionate about assisting and strengthening local law enforcement to bring to bear the power of the law and sophisticated criminal investigations using data, using technology to bring accountability into a space right now where the fishing industry entertains very low risk in actually employing slaves. There are very few convictions. You can count them on one hand of ship captains for trafficking, for example, in Thailand. And so it's low risk, high profit. And actually while it's low risk for these fishing companies, it's high risk for companies that are using those companies in their supply chains. And they assume the risk of that supply chain having slavery within it. And so that's where multinational companies can really bring to bear their leverage on these governments, their resources for these governments to actually build their justice systems to respond and actually increase the risk for running slaves. And once you start to increase the risk, then you actually see the slavery reduce. And that's what we've seen around the world and that's a successful model of intervention where we would encourage that to happen in this context as well. Minister, can you tell us a little bit about Timor-Leste's collaboration with its neighbors on the human trafficking issue? Yes, my colleagues, Minister Foreign Affairs, also here, we do it through the Bali forum, Bali process. And it has been for many years or so. And human trafficking is one of the shield we face in Timor-Leste. And we have cases in which people were caught and have to be repatriated. Just an example of one or two fishing boats that we caught in Timor-Leste, Thai fishing boats. And we found several people from many nationalities, mainly Indonesians, some of them from other countries that we believe that they were part of this human trafficking and part of this. That's why any fishing boats in Timor-Leste, the ones we're giving, all the crew are registered, the passport, and it's all certified. For example, this Chinese fishing boat, the all crew are registered, we know it, the passport, and then we have in every boat Timor-Leste is there. Unfortunately, some Timor-Leste couldn't put up with it. It was staying too long and they had to be back. But I agree with this. As part of these activities, fishing, illegal fishing activities, not only illegal fishing, human trafficking, and then as well as narcotic trafficking that always take place as well. We caught a few boats with narcotics in Timor-Leste and then they were taken to the court and then all the drugs were seized by the police. So this is the case, particularly in those areas, in that of Timor-Leste, from the satellite images, you could see a lot of illegal fishing activities. In our waters, it's diminishing now, but we work collaboratively to eliminate all the fishing activities. Now everyone is looking at the area to keep it as an area because it's the idea of a high biodiversity and that's why we're working very hard, but we're working very closely with our neighbours to shake all this, Australia, Indonesia, and then PNG. But with the Bali-Bali process, of course, this is an overall approach by the international community and regional to tackle this human trafficking. So coming up next month in June, there's the United Nations Ocean SDG summit and one of the reasons for this briefing is that the forum is working with its partners and to, on a traceability declaration around tuna because as we know, tuna is one of the almost over 90% of tuna stocks have been depleted around the world. I'm just going to use the last few minutes as a little bit of a commercial break on this traceability declaration because it's an exceedingly important initiative. The Tuna 2020 traceability declaration, it's a non-legally binding declaration that grew out of a forum such as this spurred by the President of the UN General Assembly's Ocean SDG summit next month. The declaration is endorsed by leaders of the world's biggest retailers, tuna processors, marketers, traders and harvesters with the support of influential civil society organizations and governments. The entities endorsing the traceability declaration announced concrete actions and partnerships to implement the declaration. It's a hugely, you know, tuna management is a hugely complex and multi-jurisdictional challenge. As fish tuner are highly migratory, there are more than 70 countries, including Timor-Lester reporting tuna landings, and the conservation and management of tuna fisheries are handled through five different intergovernmental regional fisheries management organizations. So it's a hugely complex, even coordinating amongst fisheries agencies is a complex thing. But tuna populations are at risk. The commitments under this declaration to the tuna traceability commitment, we pledge that all tuna products in our supply chains will be fully traceable to the vessel and trip dates and that this information will be disclosed at the point of sale, either on the packaging or via an online system, so that's a hugely ambitious challenge. We have a commitment to a socially responsible tuna supply chain. We pledge to eliminate any form of slavery and ensure suppliers at least meet minimum social standards in management practices as recommended in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Labor Organization's conventions and recommendations. So that's an anti-slavery commitment there. Commitment to environmentally responsible tuna sourcing. So there needs to be robust science-based data management plans and measures to ensure that impacts of fisheries on the environment are sustainable, including by-catch mitigation techniques. And it's a government partnership and I certainly hope we can have some conversations around that without the governments who are present here at the World Economic Forum on ASEAN. In addition to the above commitments, as industry leaders we call on and work with governments to take the actions that are needed to support them, which includes implementing harvest strategies for tuna stocks, establish under all of the intergovernmental agencies that have jurisdiction over tuna, establish systems to identify and restrict illegal seafood, and build capacity to establish and manage information systems to account for domestic and international fishing fleets. So this is all under a forum project that's now being led from our San Francisco Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution because there are technology implications on this. We have the new vision for OCEAN, which is about improving ocean health and unlocking opportunity. And this is available on the forum's website and any further information. The environment team here at the World Economic Forum will be very pleased to help you with that. If I could thank our participants and perhaps ask for one or two last thoughts on each of your respective areas here. Yes, I can say that in the molestry we are fully committed. It's a political commitment across the board on the necessity to protect our fishing resources. And we have a civil society, which is very active. Sometimes they say things that are too emotional, but we work together. And then I can tell you that this government, the next government, and the next government will not allow any activity that will endanger our fishing resources. Timor-Leste, we haven't started tuna fishing yet. We did it for a short period, but all the tuners that migrate to Timor-Leste have been fished elsewhere, maybe in Indonesia, maybe some other country. But I agree that we fully agree and then we are ready to commit ourselves, to help it. And then the only thing that we lack is the enough resources to have a full control of those illegal activities. And once we have it, we'll do it, no matter how. Thank you. Peter. Yeah, I would just congratulate the Oceans Project and the TUNA 2020 declaration, I think, is really encouraging. It's an ambitious goal, that second commitment, which is to, I think, eliminate any form of slavery from the tuna fishing industry. And I would just say to that, just to reiterate, that from our experience, a strong and effective criminal justice system response is an essential part of the solution. To eliminate slavery, that's what you need. To acknowledge really what this is, and that is that this industry that employs slaves is a criminal enterprise using coercion and deception. And to dismantle that enterprise, you must bring to bear a sophisticated law enforcement response. And so as you push towards those goals in 2020, I'd encourage continual dialogue and also commitment and resources to building and strengthening criminal justice systems to respond to this human rights abuse, to this criminal enterprise that persists today. But thank you very much for the opportunity. Thank you. So clearly the message is, it's a huge challenge. It's got environmental, social challenges all along the supply chain. And the way that we can tackle this is through collaboration between all of the stakeholders involved. So thank you very much. Thank you. Please come to dinner list. I would like to come.