Freedom for the seas for now and for the future

Current high seas oceans management is fundamentally flawed. It is creating the biggest unseen and potentially irreversible environmental disaster of our time. Marine biodiversity is being unsustainably plundered because of legal gaps and the lack of political will.To stop the destruction of high seas biodiversity, the current presumptions in favour of freedom of the high seas and the freedom to fish1 must be reversed. Instead, the international waters of the high seas must be viewed as marine reserves with potential users having to prove that they will not harm the ecosystem before they are given access to it.The current presumptions must be replaced by ones that entrench the concept of freedom for the seas: where the ecosystem approach and precautionary principle are considered as the fundamental core of all oceans management.