Croatia News - CroatiaPress.com

Zagreb, February 3 (CP) – Due to an oversight by the Justice Ministry everyone can fish in the recently implemented Protected Ecology and Fishery Belt (ZERP) in the Adriatic.

Prior to ZERP being implemented on January 1, 2008 all ministries in Croatia were tasked with checking legislation from their area in order to make sure there were no obstacles to the implementation of the Belt. However, the Justice ministry managed to miss something.

The key element for the implementation of ZERP is missing. Namely, the border of state territory at sea ends at the border of the country’s territorial waters, while in line with Croatian legislation; the police can only take action on Croatian territory.

Since ZERP is outside this area, this means that all fishing boats fishing in the Protected Belt can only get a warning from the Croatian police and no other action can be taken.

This fact has been recently noticed by a domestic expert team in charge of the ZERP issues can in theory be easily changed by adding a sentence that would say that the right to implement the law in the whole of Croatia, including its Protected Belt and this should be forwarded to parliament for adoption.

The problem now is that such a move, at this sensitive time of the start of the ZERP implementation against EU countries, namely Slovenia and Italy, might be seen as yet another provocative move and a unilateral move by Croatia.