Audrey Tang: We’re on the record now.

Max Schmid: Should I just kick off quickly?

Shao-Chi Chiu: Yep.

Max Schmid: Thank you so much for your time. It was really appreciated. We’re from the Environmental Justice Foundation. We’re based in London, but we work across Europe, Asia, and Africa on issues where environmental insecurity impacts people’s human rights.

Max Schmid: The biggest issue we’ve been working on for the longest time is fisheries and the problems that illegal fishing presents both to the environment, but also to the people who depend on fish for their livelihoods and for people working on the vessel.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. This is a priority for us as well.

Max Schmid: We did a lot of work with the Korean fleet. We’re happy to see how Korea changed over recent years. In Thailand, we did a lot of work where you not only had illegal fishing, but also slavery on board vessels in Thailand. They have had a positive change.

Max Schmid: More recently, here in Taiwan. We’ve been really pleased to see reforms that have been made here in Taiwan and the commitment from the government to change. It’s been a really positive experience over recent years in Taiwan.

Max Schmid: Trying to understand, structurally, why these problems happen around the world, our analysis is that fisheries is a unique industry and how it lacks transparency by its nature, as it’s happening far away from people’s viewpoint. It’s not like a factory where at any time, you can walk in and see what’s happening. It’s happening…

Audrey Tang: And far away from broadband connectivity, as well.

Max Schmid: Precisely. That makes people more from their operating…

Audrey Tang: It takes effort to be transparent, basically.

Audrey Tang: It cannot be transparent by default as easily as agriculture.

Max Schmid: Exactly. That’s why fisheries needs an extra effort to be transparent. Our main push globally on fisheries is to increase transparency. If we’re talking to the EU, if we’re talking to Japan or anyone, we’re always pushing the same message, which is why we’re very happy for you to publish it on the Internet.

Max Schmid: It’s always the same message of the need to fundamentally use transparency to change structurally how fisheries works.

Audrey Tang: Would you mind if I closed that door? This is not making this a closed-door meeting, but just making sure the recording [laughs] it works better.

Max Schmid: Perfect. That’s what we’re pushing. We’ve consolidated all of our views on fisheries into one set of 10 recommendations for transparency, and they’re in there. We have them also…

Audrey Tang: Is there a electronic copy?

Max Schmid: Yes. We’ll send you that.

Audrey Tang: Please do.

Max Schmid: That, English and the Mandarin.

Audrey Tang: Well, I think in English, so it is easier for me to read this. [laughs]

Max Schmid: It’s the same 10 priorities that we’re pushing everywhere. These are the ones here. In recent months, we’ve shared it with the Taiwanese government, and we’ve been very impressed by the engagement in terms of highlighting where Taiwan has already met some of our recommendations, but where there’s still a gap.

Max Schmid: What we’re trying to do is push, as you’d expect, for countries to close that gap. I think there’s an opportunity for Taiwan, which to be frank, over historical years, has a reputation in Taiwan as being a great, progressive country for human rights, but in the oceans, had a reputation that wasn’t as strong.

Max Schmid: We think there’s a real opportunity now to build on the reforms that have been made to flip that narrative. The example I always give is Spain, which for many years was seen as sort of the bad boy of the oceans, as being the one that was always stealing all the fish and misbehaving.

Max Schmid: Whereas in the last 10 years, Spain has managed to build a reputation as being one of the strongest proponents of legal fisheries. We think the same opportunity is here for Taiwan to change its reputation to being not somebody who’s just followed an EU warning, but a country that’s really leading on transparency.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, and exporting our ways to be transparent.

Max Schmid: Exactly. It fits in with your human rights agenda, but it also fits in with the digital agenda, the agenda that the president opened up to Southeast Asia, where most of the workers on the vessels come from, to improve the reputation of Taiwan in Indonesia and the Philippines, the people who are supplying the workers.

Max Schmid: We think there’s a real chance here to seize the initiative and not lose any momentum from the end of the other part, but to say that Taiwan is embracing transparency…

Audrey Tang: Very much so.

Max Schmid: …not only here on the island, but globally, on its fishing fleet. We’ve done a gap analysis between where Taiwan is currently and our 10 recommendations.

Audrey Tang: I think I did have a copy. That was the same thing, OK.

Max Schmid: The pitch really is for Taiwan to be one of the first countries to say that maybe you’re not there yet with the 10 recommendations, but to say that as a concept, you want to see transparency be the golden thread that runs through the fisheries, and that you embrace this sort of charter for transparency.

Max Schmid: I think as a corollary to that, I met with the Taiwanese office in London, the embassy in London, a few months ago, and they were saying, “Thank you for all your work,” blah, blah, blah, “but every time you make a video, it’s always critical. It’s always saying bad things are happening in Taiwan. “Why don’t you say the positive things?”

Max Schmid: There was a brief discussion about one of our recommendations, the technical issue about giving every vessel a number. We found out that actually, now, everyone is going to have a number. I said to the guys in London, “The Taiwanese embassy is…” I think sometimes, you’re making these reforms, but you’re not shouting about it.

Audrey Tang: We are, but not in English.

Max Schmid: Potentially.

Max Schmid: (laughter)

Audrey Tang: No, seriously.

Max Schmid: That means other countries, people aren’t going to…

Audrey Tang: That’s right, that’s right. That’s something we’ve got to improve.

Max Schmid: People aren’t going to read the news in Mandarin, other than a few countries.

Audrey Tang: Very much so. Maybe people in Singapore learns about it, but that’s about it. [laughs]

Max Schmid: For other countries to see Taiwan as a leader, we’re happy to help you really promote. If you are going to give every vessel a number, let’s shout about it. Let’s make it a big deal. I understand you don’t, there’s probably domestic reasons why you might not want to always be seen to be pushing fishermen in one direction.

Max Schmid: Internationally, there’s a real opportunity to seize this and say, “Taiwan wants to lead on transparency. This is what we’re doing.” That’s our appeal.

Audrey Tang: This is great.

Max Schmid: Just very pleased to have the chance to discuss this with you.

Audrey Tang: Sure. I think the previous time we worked together is on the professional fishers and amateur fishers on harbor, sharing the harbor case. In that case, it’s a very similar thing, because amateur fishers – people who fish for a hobby – were usually excluded from the reporting duties of the marine species biodiversity, the harvest reporting, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: They really want to participate in harbors, which is usually just done by professional fishers people. There is a lot of internal clash between the two fishing populations. We helped to hold, along with Minister without Portfolio Chang Ching-sen, a series of meetings so that there’s now almost 100 by the end of year, but at least 50 legal fishing spots.

Audrey Tang: Where both the self-regulation can be ensured by amateur fishers, and it won’t interfere with professional fishers. This is done just by making the process of both geospatial information around the actual area – like where the wind is blowing or things like that – radically transparent.

Audrey Tang: Also, involving the stakeholders in each cities, counties, and municipalities into the live streamed debate – or deliberation at the end, but debate at the beginning – so that people can collaboratively figure out the rules.

Audrey Tang: I totally agree that the best way we can get everybody knowing about this – not just people who practice fishing, but actually, everybody who cares about the ocean – is to be as transparent as possible and be as loud as possible.

Audrey Tang: Live streaming is just the beginning. We would love to work with you, if you want to help us make short clips that will appeal to international audience. That’s not exactly our forte before. Some examples, or some coaching, would really help.

Max Schmid: Fantastic. Do you want to maybe talk about some, a little bit more detail, then, about some of the things that Taiwan could do to close the gap?

Shao-Chi Chiu: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Audrey Tang: On the first item, is there an international standard for listing a fishing license and authorizations that we can use machine-to-machine formats to communicate to the world?

Max Schmid: There’s two things. There’s an international numbering scheme, which the International Maritime Organization operations, and which Taiwan’s vessels are now almost at 100 percent, or at 100 percent.

Audrey Tang: That’s the coding, yes.

Max Schmid: That’s the unique number from when it’s built to when it goes to the scrapyard. That’s a great first step. Again, shouting about it, saying, “Taiwan is going to do this. This is now official Taiwan policy.” There’s a way to publish your lists internationally. Eventually, there’s the FAO, which is the UN body for fisheries, which Taiwan’s a member of some of the FAO sub-regional groups.

Max Schmid: They’re building a global list of fishing vessels as well, which those IMO number lists can feed onto. There is good digital formats to plug into by doing that.

Audrey Tang: I will appreciate looking into that, because if we hire a translator and translate periodically the Mandarin text, it creates two risks. First, that this is not a budget, nor an obligation by law. It may lose this translation anytime. I’ve seen this happening many times.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that it’s not guaranteed to be correct by your standards. Then other language communities will want more translations as well. Usually, what we do here is that we settle on international standard. For example, for air pollution or for water pollution now, and for disaster alert and things like that, we found an international standard called SensorThings.

Audrey Tang: SensorThings is an IoT shared standard. We use the latest version, and then we publish just those structured data. After publishing the structured data, the interested down streams can, whether they are journalists, scientists, or people practicing in the field, they can just take this data and make whatever visualization slides, articles, essays, whatever they want to make.

Audrey Tang: We only guarantee the accuracy of the structured data, but not particularly about the format and layout, because every stakeholder would actually prefer a different layout. That’s what we usually do.

Audrey Tang: If you have an example of any jurisdictions in the world publishing this data that you just mentioned, that currently will only publishing human-readable format in Mandarin Chinese, then we would very much appreciate to use that as a reference.

Audrey Tang: Then start publishing that in the open data platform, which I’m sure that our agency here has a lot of experience working with. Then from the central portal, data.gov.tw, you can get an assured feed of data. The license is very liberal. You can use it for commercial purposes, educational purposes, as long as you link back to where the data comes from. That’s the only thing we ask, is just attribution.

Audrey Tang: You don’t have to pay a royalty, or sign some no-harm agreement, or whatever. That’s our preferred solution to the issues such as this.

Max Schmid: That fits in with this international numbering scheme. There’s data sets that are standard. Most of them are numerical, so the translation issue isn’t a metric, numbers. That shouldn’t be a problem. The name of the vessel has presented problems in the past, but if everyone has this number, then that becomes irrelevant. Then you’re left with, I think the owner is probably the only tricky thing.

Max Schmid: An important part of transparency is where the flow of profits is going to beneficial ownership. In fisheries, that can be very confusing, because it gets wrapped up in vessels that might be trying to avoid tax, because they’re using other countries’ flags, and all sorts of issues.

Audrey Tang: It’s exactly the same as international beneficial ownership tracking, the Panama Papers and all.

Max Schmid: Exactly. That’s the one issue where translation might be an issue, but I’m sure we can come up with a smart solution to that.

Audrey Tang: Sure. Currently, do we publish the name of the person?

Ding-Rong Lin: Not yet.

Audrey Tang: No, right?

Ding-Rong Lin: Not until some consideration for the owners of the so-called FOC (Flag of convenience) vessels to be addressed. However, we try our best effort to seek any solution to resolve this issue. At the moment, due to the legal constraints, we cannot publish the owner name of the FOC fishing vessel.

Audrey Tang: For this one, for the numbering, just like the real price registration, 實價登錄, this is not about a person, so it’s totally OK to publish it without modifying the law. It could be just a regulation or a policy.

Ding-Rong Lin: Yes. Now, we are talking about IMO number. We can require all fishing vessels to get the IMO number, and we can mandate them to publish it on our website without having to amend the law.

Audrey Tang: Right, we could do it at the regulation level.

Ding-Rong Lin: According to our regulation, it is required for the fishermen to get the IMO number as one of the conditions of granting distant water fishing permit.

Audrey Tang: The key here is that it’s not personal data, as defined by our Personal Data Protection Act. Our PDPA says wherever we asked someone to provide their real name in a publicly-consumable manner without any prior contract or relationship, then it need to be mandated by a law. We cannot just change a regulation and suddenly start publishing people’s names on websites.

Audrey Tang: We had this discussion on the new Company Act, and the changes we made placed Taiwan in the top anti-money laundering category approved by APG.

Audrey Tang: It is easier to start thinking about laws but without actually putting out drafts.

Max Schmid: A lot of these things are very short term, like the numbering scheme and other things that Taiwan have already done. A few of them are more ambitious, like the beneficial ownership.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Max Schmid: I think ultimately, I would appeal that data privacy issues shouldn’t…I understand you have to go through a legal process, but if somebody’s trying to access a public resource, a global resource, then I think that they should be willing to name themselves.

Audrey Tang: Usually, the concern is that if we do this unilaterally, without every other participating country doing it, then we are at a disadvantage from multiple angles. If it’s now an international norm, that everybody is starting to publish the same thing…

Audrey Tang: Actually, for beneficial ownership, that’s a really good example. Even the advocates like the UK, they have two years or something of a sunrise period for that information to get published. For procurement data, I think, outside of the WTO, there’s a very long sunrise period as well.

Audrey Tang: Usually, we participate exactly probably at the median point of where everybody else is committing to this. We totally agree that if this is an international norm, then we will follow through and change accordingly, if needed.

Max Schmid: Emerging international, yeah. We’re trying to push it. It’s always a balance between being the only one, being the follower, as you say, and the mean. I think in two or three years, publishing beneficial will become the norm.

Audrey Tang: A norm, that’s right.

Max Schmid: It would be great to see Taiwan in the leading edge of that norm.

Audrey Tang: Personally, I am all for it. I am just saying that our legislators usually take this strategy when it comes to international obligations.

Max Schmid: Was there any other point you wanted to highlight on the detail side of…?

Shao-Chi Chiu: The VMS and the AIS. As another point that, at least 10, Taiwan haven’t really done is still…

Audrey Tang: Like the VDR is not ubiquitous?

Shao-Chi Chiu: The VDR is for the coastal fishing vessels?

Audrey Tang: Yes. I think the smaller ones don’t have…

Ding-Rong Lin: We have required all distant water fishing vessels to install the VMS. Now, the requirement of EJF is to publish VMS information to the public by Fisheries Agency.

Shao-Chi Chiu: Also, or…

Max Schmid: For the large distant water vessels.

Shao-Chi Chiu: Yeah, for the distant water fisheries, or mandate the AIS for all the vessels.

Audrey Tang: Just a second. Would you like everything the VMS collects, or are there particular indicators or particular patterns that you would like to see published?

Max Schmid: Mainly, the vessel’s position. Then you know if the vessel’s, where it’s fishing, if it’s been…Different countries are starting to do this. Indonesia is doing this. Some South American countries are doing this. The EU is mandating AIS, which is a different way of showing where vessels are. Every country can…

Audrey Tang: Which is opt-in at the moment, right? I don’t know how many countries…

Ding-Rong Lin: Frankly speaking at the moment, very few countries have published their VMS information.

Audrey Tang: In a mandatory fashion.

Ding-Rong Lin: …public sector…

Max Schmid: It’s maybe eight or nine countries so far.

Ding-Rong Lin: In general, the VMS information is very sensitive for each country, and particularly for all fishermen. They don’t want to show their fishing grounds.

Max Schmid: What Indonesia, I think, has done is to delay. You see it three days later, so it doesn’t jeopardize the security of the vessel. Pirates don’t know where they are, because it’s three days delayed.

Audrey Tang: It’s an anti-piracy measure.

Max Schmid: There are ways of addressing that. Some of the larger Taiwanese vessels are already using AIS, so you can see where they are. I think that, again, the public benefit versus the private, the need for privacy. I think there’s ways of compromising. Ultimately, to give confidence to…

Max Schmid: One of the things that more and more retailers, people who are ultimately going to sell the fish, want to be able to do is to look down the supply chain and verify that the vessel is behaving properly. For them to be able to access that information gives them the confidence.

Audrey Tang: I totally agree. Two things. You talk about a reduced resolution in time. What about reduced resolution in space? Just how precise would you like for the…

Ding-Rong Lin: Aggregate data.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, for the data.

Max Schmid: Ultimately, the types of things we’re trying to see is, is the vessel operating in an ocean where they shouldn’t be, or are they operating in…?

Audrey Tang: Right. It’s about geofencing. As long as they are within geofence, perhaps you would only have to know that they are within the geofence. Do you know what I am talking about?

Max Schmid: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: If they are legally operating, they shouldn’t incur the extra burden. Of course, if they are legally operating, there won’t be as much risk for piracy, either. Then it’s hard to argue that the public benefit then outweigh the privacy concerns.

Max Schmid: Some other things are actually a lot more precise than just ocean. A way that some vessels will get their product to market is by trans-shipping, so coming across another vessel. Those interactions with other vessels is also information that we’d like to have public.

Audrey Tang: Right. Maybe publish whenever a vessel is closing in with another vessel? It’s easier if you can clearly spell out the public benefit conditions under which revelation of the coordinates – or not coordinates, but relative coordinates – is useful.

Audrey Tang: Then we can start talking about whether they conform to the purpose of our bylaws. Based on the purpose of the bylaws and the IUU watchlist removal procedure that we just went through, if we can identify a clear, not just good-to-have, but necessary means to fulfill those common values. As long there is an alternative, people will try to use the alternative.

Audrey Tang: If you can demonstrate for trans-shipping that there really is no alternative other than using VMS data to just couple the two ships together, then we can argue that maybe it’s good to flag those cases and the general coordinates a few days after this happens. Without revealing the whole trajectory data for everybody.

Max Schmid: With the precise fishing language.

Audrey Tang: Right, because that will be, if the people who practice fishing takes it to the court, the court will say that it’s beyond the necessary means to fulfill a policy or a legal goal. Just narrowing it down would be really helpful.

Max Schmid: That’s really interesting.

Audrey Tang: I think for real-time land ownership price declaration, our current legislation is that it’s aggregated within 50 numbers. You know that which block this transaction happened and the real price. The price is not in the aggregate, but a spatial domain is in the aggregate.

Audrey Tang: People feel a bit more comfortable in doing so. We understand, for example, in the US, quite a few states publish in the aggregate. There are also states publish down the street number. It’s all about co-designing the social norms…

Max Schmid: The price of land transactions?

Audrey Tang: Right, and buildings. It’s all about just social norm. If the social norm thinks that 50 numbers is a good balance, then it’s very hard for legislators to push into specific numbering, even though the administration takes the position that our draft says it’s specific to the street numbering.

Audrey Tang: When it goes to the MPs, who have constituents, they will look at it and say, “Is this absolutely necessary?” and things like that.

Max Schmid: In addition to EJF, there’s some really good groups working on this, on that issue of vessel location. A group called Global Fishing Launch, which I think now has a person working in Taiwan, I’m sure they could rise to that challenge of showing how to present data in way that doesn’t go beyond…

Audrey Tang: The necessary data for the necessary conditions.

Max Schmid: Exactly, and that doesn’t go beyond what’s necessary.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. That will also make our job easier as well, if legislators start asking about this. We will say, “This is already a fair and balanced conversation.” If we send a draft bill, it’s already after talking to all the stakeholders. Usually, in shapes like this, it’s easier for the parliament to push this through. Again, it’s next January. [laughs]

Ding-Rong Lin: I have some comments on this issue. The first thing is in this issue is controversial to some degree of commercial users. Our fishermen have some concern if they have the fishing grant, the public disclosure they will have some impact for their operations. At the moment, it’s not the position for the fishery agency to publish that information.

Audrey Tang: Sure. What we’re talking about is that, if they’re within legal areas of operation, and they’re not trans-shipping, we really shouldn’t ask them to publish anything, right? That’s the position that I just outlined.

Ding-Rong Lin: Another one is, I think that the fishery agency have full control of fishing fleet’s operation, particularly for those fishing vessels operating in the high seas. Our situation is totally different from the situation of Indonesian. I’m not sure if they have full control over their fishing vessels operation. We think it is easy for Indonesia to rely on the external assitance, for the instance, the NGOs.

Audrey Tang: They essentially crowd-source that capacity.

Ding-Rong Lin: Indonesia lacks of capacity, so it is necessary for the help from NGOs to assist them to monitor their fishing vessels’ activity. In our case, we can fully control our fishing fleets. We have an advanced IT system to monitor our fishing vessels.

Audrey Tang: Indeed, our PDIS colleagues saw the Fisheries Agency dashboard system a few months ago. It’s very, very impressive.

Ding-Rong Lin: Now, next step is that we need to establish the cooperation with some countries, in particular for those countries with common concerns on the fact of the FOC vessels.

Audrey Tang: Right.

Ding-Rong Lin: …or nationals. We cooperate with, for example, Seychelles, Panama, or Vanuatu. At the moment, we have established cooperation with Vanuatu to have dialog with their government officials. Next step, we also need to establish similar relations with the other countries.

Audrey Tang: What Mr. Lin is talking about is that we have a really good accountability mechanism between governments. Like our government, other governments, they are now in a very high-resolution data sharing relationship. What they are talking about is essentially government-to-citizen accountability, which is another thing altogether.

Audrey Tang: When co-designing G2C accountability, my personal experience is twofold.

Audrey Tang: First, that if we have shared the same values, such as the ones that you just mentioned, it’s easier if we first agree on the values, instead of the implementations, which is why I asked for the list of conditions and the necessary data to detect those conditions.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that if an agency in charge by law for regulating industry, we have a fiduciary-ish duty for people, for commercial operators who put their data to us to entrust, essentially, their data to us. To provide accountability without compromising their normal and legal operation, there’s a paradigm called Open Algorithms, or OPAL.

Audrey Tang: OPAL is designed such that you can write code, algorithms, that given what we will say synthetic data. That is to say, not real data, but you can learn about the data’s shape, like GPS, date, and so on, but none of this real. Based on this data, you can work with technologists to write algorithms that goes through the data and flag things as suspicious or as needing to provide fuller accountability to the citizens.

Audrey Tang: We’re not publishing the raw data at all. Usually, we just take those algorithm and have our experts audit that it doesn’t compromise privacy for people who abide by the law. Then we run the algorithm internally, in our data center, without sharing any raw data. We could publish the aggregate, statistics, and the flagging information, as generated by the civil society’s algorithm, to the public.

Audrey Tang: I think that is the balance between not compromising the legal operators’ positions, as well as helping to detect illicit or fraudulent cases. I will be honest in saying that this is so new that we only so far have one case, a pilot case, starting to use this.

Audrey Tang: Incidentally, it’s about beneficial ownership. It’s using data about companies’ operation, land, trade, things like that, to detect what we call 詐貸. How do we translate that to English? A fraudulent loan, maybe. A company sets up with two sibling, conspiring companies. They trade something that’s worthless as $1 billion, and that trades back. It creates a false revenue. Then they use that to take a loan on the bank, because they have false credit. Then they go to some extrajudicial place.

Audrey Tang: In our Presidential Hackathon a couple months ago, a cross-sectoral team built a machine learning system that looks at these issues and numbers which could be uncorrelated to a human eye. Then they also, with land prize and everything, and they trained an AI model to predict in the next month how is a public-list company likely to engage in fraudulent loan behavior.

Audrey Tang: During, I think, the second round, they showed this presentation saying, “We predict that in the next two months, these will be at risk.” At the Presidential Hackathon demo day, one of them actually gets reported as having this illicit behavior. So I think this showed a real promise of this kind of open algorithm collaboration.

Audrey Tang: The President gave them a trophy. The trophy carries no prize money, but it contains a projector. You can turn it on and project the president. It carries the presidential promise of implementing their idea in the next year. We now have our first pilot case of a genuine open algorithm case. That operates are commercial data that are so sensitive, there is no good legal reason to publish any of this to the public.

Audrey Tang: If we keep an electronic invoice, this is for the purpose of facilitating trade and taxation. Then, if somehow its aggregated statistics can also indicate fraudulent loans, we must show to the public that this does not run counter to the privacy expectations.

Audrey Tang: We’re very willing to try to explore such an opportunity.

Max Schmid: I think that this problem lends itself to a similar collaboration, of bringing civil society, government, industry together to come up with what’s necessary and what’s beyond necessary, as you say.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. If you need political will, then next April, feel free to enter the Presidential Hackathon. Every year, we choose five teams to give them the trophy. Meaning that for the whatever they did in the past three months as a prototype, we commit ourself to take it into public service in the next year. That’s the president’s promise.

Audrey Tang: For the illicit loan case, it would really require the presidential mandate.

Max Schmid: Yeah, this is much more simple. This is just people fishing.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Audrey Tang: (laughter)

Max Schmid: We work with a group that mainly focuses on this, and we’ll recommend that they enter that hackathon. I think that would be really good. I think, again, returning to the broader concept of transparency, we’d be really keen to see if there’s ways for obviously, being aware that you’ve got elections coming up, and that there’s a focus there.

Max Schmid: Is Taiwan, I think it would be good to take credit for things that you’ve already done, but also, things you’re thinking about doing, and to make this simple statement to the world that you’re embracing transparency.

Max Schmid: Not that you’re tomorrow going to do all 10 things, but that in general, you agree that transparency is a means to exit the global problem of illegal fishing and associated issues, like human trafficking, and that you’re working on all these areas. If you guys are up for that, we’d be keen to collaborate and make that a globally-accessible thing.

Audrey Tang: There’s a recent presentation, just after we got the IUU watchlist removal, at the cabinet meeting. I was at that meeting, and I think the presentation is pretty good. It contains the elements that you just mentioned, which is very good, but it’s not in English. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: A good first step is just to maybe work on the messaging that we already put out from the fishing agency, including the cabinet meeting slides, but I’m sure they have more data as well. Then maybe, because to an international audience, what’s interesting, what’s not interesting is not for us to decide.

Audrey Tang: Maybe you can help us to at least get the order of presentation right. Instead of presenting something really trivial, we just start by presenting something that has an oomph factor. [laughs] Then the following.

Max Schmid: Also, just stepping away from the detail, a detailed presentation of just saying, “Taiwan sees transparency as a way to address this issue. We’re embracing transparency. Here’s some examples of what we’re doing, but in general, we want to work hand-in-hand with the international community to push this forward.” We’d be keen to promote that and highlight that.

Audrey Tang: Sure. Right after the election, there will be a coordinated effort to identify anywhere in Taiwan that, in the past few years, we’d done better than four years ago for transparency, participation, accountability. Inclusion is the one, and to do a concerted effort to translate everything into English.

Audrey Tang: We do this because we want to work with an international organization called Open Government Partnership, the OGP. The OGP has its own format of people from civil society working hand-in-hand with their government on extracting what have already done, and what are our promises in terms of transparency, participation, accountability, and inclusion.

Audrey Tang: It’s not, how do we say, 重複管考?

Ding-Rong Lin: Double audit.

Audrey Tang: It’s not a double audit. It’s not saying that our fishing agency must now report in two forms. I’m sure that they are already reporting five forms. It’s about a concerted effort from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which really should own this thing, and the National Development Council to jointly because the NDC has the tracking data of all the major projects that are for public construction and public welfare.

Audrey Tang: They agreed to work together to pick the things that make sense from a transparency and participation initiatives, and to collaboratively push what we call the National Action Plan for the Taiwan open government. That already has, I think, cross-partisan buy-in. It will happen no matter what. I think that is the best chance for us to have a, as you said, an overarching theme on transparency.

Audrey Tang: Not just on fishing, but rather, on all the 17 goals. Fishing, of course, is part of the 17 goals. As long as it’s part of the SDGs, it will be a really good contribution to our voluntary national review, our UN review, because that review currently is weak at the 16th goal, which is transparency, a fair jurisdiction, and all sort of open government stuff.

Audrey Tang: We’re going to massively enhance the SDG 16 section of our VNR starting next year. For obvious reasons, we cannot promise what will happen in the next four years until next January, [laughs] because it has to coincide with the presidential term.

Max Schmid: Of course. It also supports other goals, like decent work and ocean, safe, productive oceans.

Audrey Tang: Very much so. That’s right, that’s right. I think work, per se, will begin in January. You are cordially invited, if you are interested, in getting the process right. For the rest of the year, what we can do is securing the budget and securing the personnel for the next year’s National Action Plan compilation.

Audrey Tang: It should be at no extra effort for the fishing agency, because it’s just the MOFA and NDC having resources to translate these into English and in a format that the civil society can appreciate. That part, we need help from you, [laughs] like what format would actually, what KPIs make sense? What parts of their work should be highlighted? There will be a co-creation process.

Max Schmid: Great, good. The last thing is, and I don’t know if this is a political or an official level, but increasingly Japan is looking at these issues. We’ve been invited to an event in Japan in November with Japanese industry who are getting more interested in where our fish is coming from.

Max Schmid: Taiwan is a huge supplier of fish to Japan. We thought it would be good for them to hear from the Taiwan government what your ambition is on this area. It’s in November. We can send an invite through. It would be good for someone from Taiwan to go there.

Audrey Tang: We’ll need a more detailed agenda for them to make a decision.

Max Schmid: You mentioned this presentation that was given to cabinet. That could be a good thing to demonstrate to Japanese fishing industry.

Audrey Tang: As a starting point.

Max Schmid: Exactly. Great. We’ll send you the details.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. All right, that’s…

Max Schmid: Fantastic. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: OK, thank you. Thanks so much.

Shao-Chi Chiu: Thank you very much.