1.

(a) The Commission states that, despite the fact that the catch quotas allocated to France for 1986 were exhausted in respect of other species in Norwegian waters in September 1986 and in respect of redfish in Faeroese waters in May 1986 on the first occasion and, following an exchange of quotas in June, in November 1986 on a second occasion, the French authorities failed to take the measures necessary to impose a provisional prohibition on fishing by their fishermen in the zones concerned. With respect to redfish, the Commission also states that the French authorities, which had informed the Community officials of the exhaustion of the initial quota in May 1986, without however suspending fishing of that species themselves, failed to take, in October, any measure to prevent further infringement of the quota, which had been increased following an exchange of quotas notified to the Commission in June 1986. Article 10(2) of Regulation No 2057/82 requires each Member State to prevent any quota from being exceeded by determining in advance the foreseeable date on which it will be exhausted, at which time its vessels should be provisionally prohibited from fishing. The Commission infers from the fact that quotas were exceeded that the French Republic's failure to fulfil the obligation laid down in that article is self-evident. Moreover, the French Government does not deny the infringement but seeks to justify it by mentioning difficulties encountered in obtaining information on catches promptly because of the remoteness of the fishing grounds in question and its attempt to overcome those difficulties by exchanging quotas. In the Commission's view, that argument is unacceptable. Exchanges of quotas cannot compensate for the inadequacy of the national authorities' system for the compilation of information on catches. Moreover, the Member States have means at their disposal to take action in due time in order to prevent quotas from being exceeded. For example, Article 8 of Regulation No 2057/82 provides that information on catches is to be submitted to the State whose flag the vessel is flying not later than 15 days after the catch where the transshipment or landing takes place more than 15 days after the catch, and in practice such information would be transmitted by radio. Moreover, pursuant to Annex IV, points 4.2.1 to 4.2.3, of Commission Regulation (EEC) No 2807/83 of 22 September 1983 laying down detailed rules for recording information on Member States' catches of fish (Official Journal L 276, p. 1), the masters of fishing vessels must, when landing catches in the State whose flag they are flying, forward to the authorities of that State the original logbook and a landing declaration no later than 48 hours after landing is completed, and the same time-limit applies in the case of landing in a different Member State or in a non-member country. In order to ensure compliance with that obligation, Article 1(2) of Regulation No 2057/82 requires every Member State to take penal or administrative action against the skippers of fishing vessels where inspections by the national authorities show that they have not complied with the relevant regulations, which relate, inter alia, to the minimum frequency with which information on catches is to be submitted. The Commission adds that, pursuant to Article 14 of Regulation No 2057/82, the Member States are always at liberty to adopt national inspection measures going beyond the minimum requirements laid down by that regulation, provided that they conform with the Community legislation and fishing policy. Finally, the Commission observes that the Court has consistently held that a Member State may not plead difficulties encountered in implementing Community rules to justify a failure to observe them. Thus, the Court recently held that it is the responsibility of the Member States, which are entrusted with the implementation of Community regulations for the purposes of the common organization of the markets in fishery products, to overcome any difficulties involved in carrying out inspections by taking the appropriate measures (judgment in Case 262/87 Netherlands v Commission [1989] ECR 225, paragraph 15) and that the responsibility to suspend fishing in due time, in order to ensure that quotas are not exceeded, attaches primarily to each Member State (ibid., paragraph 17). (b) In its reply, the Commission refutes the arguments put forward by the French Republic in its defence. — As regards the argument concerning the remoteness of the fishing grounds to which the present proceedings relate, the Commission points out that Regulation No 2057/82 provides for the Community information facilities available to the Member States to ensure compliance with quotas and enables the reliability of the information entered in the logbook of vessels and forwarded to the national authorities to be ensured by means of various control measures, and where appropriate legal proceedings and suitable penalties. More generally, the Member States' obligation — described in Article 5(2) of Regulation No 170/83 — to determine, in accordance with the applicable Community provisions, the detailed rules for the utilization of the quotas allocated to them requires them to take all necessary measures to ensure compliance with the quota fixed, if necessary adjusting such measures to the type of fishing concerned and, in order to take account of the remoteness of the fishing grounds, by requiring sufficiently frequent forwarding of information to ensure that the quota is not exhausted. — In reply to the French Government's arguments according to which account must be taken of the uncertainties associated with delimitation of the Faeroese waters and the absence of Community harmonization of the conversion factor for catches in terms of live weight, the Commission draws attention to the fact that the French Government did not raise those arguments in the pre-litigation phase. As regards the alleged lack of a clear delimitation between Faeroese and United Kingdom waters, the Commission finds it difficult to see how that factor can have any impact on determination of the final level of catches or on the speed at which quotas are used up at any given time, particularly since the French authorities were in a position to establish in due time the exhaustion of the quota for redfish in Faroese waters, which was notified to the Commission by telex message of 12 May 1986, and then to exchange quotas for that species with the United Kingdom authorities. As regards the conversion factor to be applied to the cleaned fish which is landed in order to calculate tonnages in terms of live weight for the purpose of comparison with the quotas allocated, the Commission contends that it is incumbent on each Member State, pursuant to Article 5(2) of Regulation No 170/83, to take all necessary measures to make up for the lack of Community harmonization of that factor, and that no differences existing as between the Member States can justify failure to observe the quotas allocated to them. In any event, no problems in that regard can account for the breaches of quota at issue in the present case, which exceed 60% in the case of the quota laid down for other species in Norwegian waters and 20% of the aggregate quota, following the exchange of quotas, for redfish in Faeroese waters. — The Commission also refutes the French Government's argument that, for the two stocks in question, the Community quotas were never fully used between 1986 and 1988. That argument, which is based on an interpretation ex post facto of the events at issue, would render meaningless the obligation to impose a provisional prohibition of fishing which is incumbent on the Member States by virtue of Anicie 10(2) of Regulation No 2057/82. Since a Member State cannot foresee the extent to which the other Member States will exploit stocks of the same species, the conservation of fishery resources requires the provisional prohibition of fishing to be decided upon by the Member State exclusively on the basis of a comparison of the quota attributed to it and the objective data for catches of which its authorities are kept regularly informed. Moreover, as France did in the case of redfish fishing in Faeroese waters, the Member States can increase their own quotas by quota exchanges with other Member States subject to the same Community quota, thus benefiting from the latter's lower level of use. — Nor is the Commission persuaded by the French Republic's argument to the effect that the introduction of a statistical system for the compilation and processing of data contained in logbooks, which became obligatory, according to the French Government, as from 1 April 1986, called for an adjustment period by reason of its complexity. In that regard, the Commission points out, on the one hand, that Regulation No 2807/83 made the Community form of logbook compulsory as from 1 April 1985 (and not 1986 as wrongly contended by the defendant) and, on the other, that the Member States' obligation to forward to the national authorities promptly the information entered in the logbooks and the other control measures, in particular the recording of catches declared, transshipped and landed, laid down by Regulation No 2057/82, had been in force since 1 January 1983. Accordingly, the Commission states that France was deemed, as of that date, to have at its disposal the means to ensure that its fishermen complied with the quotas allocated to it. The Commission adds that the French authorities' failure to act is particularly clear in the present case since, by informing the Commission on 12 May 1986 of the exhaustion of the initial quota for redfish in Faeroese waters — without, moreover, provisionally halting fishing, as they were required to do by Article 10(2) of Regulation No 2057/82 — they showed that they were in a position to avoid such breaches of quota, regardless of the very limited volume of the quotas and the seasonal character of the fishing concerned, factors which the French Government thus wrongly relied on in its defence. — In response to the defendant government's argument that it is not appropriate to rely — as the Commission did in 1986 for certain stocks (cod, saithe, mackerel and hake) in the ICES zones — on the extent of over-fishing, expressed as a percentage of the total quota, in order to decide, by reference to that percentage, whether or not it is appropriate to commence proceedings for infringement of the Treaty, but that an assessment should be made in terms of absolute value, by comparing the contested quota infringements with, on the one hand, the levels of infringements which are regarded as insignificant and are therefore ignored by the Commission and, on the other, with the catch capacities of the fishing vessels in Faeroese and Norwegian waters, the Commission maintains that a comparison of the infringements in absolute terms, namely in terms of tonnage, is meaningless: the quotas attributed to France vary considerably in quantity, depending on the stocks and the fishing zones concerned. On the other hand, a percentage comparison discloses, in the case of the stocks for which the Commission considered that the infringement was not necessarily indicative of mismanagement of the quota and did not therefore justify proceedings, over-fishing of less than 1% of each of the quotas allocated to France. On the other hand, the breaches of quota on which the Commission decided to act in the present case — 21% for redfish and 60% for other species — reflect, by virtue of their size, the failure of the French authorities to take in due time the measures necessary to stop fishing for those two stocks. Moreover, in its replies to the letter calling for observations and to the reasoned opinion, the French Government clearly admitted the infringement of obligations of which the Commission accused it, without questioning the extent thereof by comparison with the other infringements to which the Commission referred in its letter calling for observations, but in respect of which it decided not to take proceedings. As regards the catch capacity in excess of 10 tonnes per day of the fishing vessels operating in Norwegian and Faeroese waters, the Commission considers that, far from rendering the two alleged quota infringements less significant, it constituted a reason for the French authorities to be correspondingly more vigilant. In view of the limited volume of the two quotas in question, they should have made certain, by all appropriate means, that they knew at what speed the quotas were being used up, having regard in particular to the catch capacities of the French vessels operating in those waters. — Finally, the Commission rejects the French Government's argument that it is necessary, in assessing the contested quota infringements and the delay between the date of such infringements and the date on which fishing was closed, to take account not only of the time needed for the transmission of catch data by the skippers of fishing vessels to the national authorities but also the time taken by those authorities to forward the monthly catch declarations to the Commission. The effect of such an argument would be that a Member State could escape the responsibilities imposed on it by the Community rules concerning fishing quota management. In the first place, the French Government is not entitled, in order to justify the breaches of quota at issue, to invoke delays in the forwarding by the skippers of fishing vessels of data concerning catches made, since the Member States may, if necessary, go further than the minimum monitoring requirements laid down by Regulation No 2057/82 and require more frequent forwarding of information, by radio for example. Similarly, the defendant government may not rely in its defence on the period of 15 days envisaged in Article 9(2) of Regulation No 2057/82, since that period in no way discharges Member States from the obligation to stop fishing well before that formality is completed. If that were not the case, the result would be that it would be possible, on the basis of the time-limit for forwarding catch data to the Commission, to close fishing at the earliest in the middle of the month following that in which the catches made might have already exceeded the quota allocated, a situation which might have come about in the first days of the month. Such an interpretation conflicts directly with Article 10(2) of the same regulation, which requires each Member State provisionally to prohibit fishing as from the date on which catches are deemed to have exhausted the quota, which means that such a decision is to be made in due time, in other words as soon as exhaustion of the quota is foreseeable and therefore, if appropriate, even before the quota is wholly exhausted. In the case of catches of redfish in Faroese waters, the breach of the quota, as shown by the monthly statistics notified by the French authorities, was foreseeable from the catch figures for September 1986, since the cumulative total catch for the first nine months of that year had already reached 506 tonnes as against a quota which amounted, after the exchange in June, to 510 tonnes, that figure remaining unchanged in October in the absence of catches. In view of the large fishing capacity of the vessels operating in those waters, the breach could therefore have been brought about by the first catches in October or, in any event, those at the beginning of November, and certainly not, as wrongly contended by the French Government, at the end of that month, when the quota had already been far exceeded. The French Government has no grounds for contending that, having regard to those data, it was not in a position to decide to close fishing until January 1987. That statement is all the more surprising in view of the fact that the French authorities were able, as early as 12 May 1986, to determine that the initial quota of 440 tonnes had been exhausted, even though, at the end of April, the cumulative total catch was only 373 tonnes. That clearly shows that the French authorities were able very rapidly to obtain information as to the rate at which quotas were being used and confirms that the suspension of fishing of that stock should have been decided on by France in October or, at the latest, the beginning of November 1986. As regards the breach of the quota for the other species in Norwegian waters, the Commission states that it occurred in September 1986. In this case too, there is no justification for the French authorities' failure to take any decision during October. As regards definitive suspension of fishing, the Commission took a decision in that regard on 14 November and, contrary to the defendant government's contention, did so exclusively on the basis of the data notified by the French authorities. The decision was thus taken when the quota had already been exceeded by far, a fact which indicates the initial responsibility incumbent on the national authorities to prohibit fishing provisionally.