BLUE MARINE FOUNDATION

Pro Bono for Ocean Resilience

Pro bono lawyers at Cleary Gottlieb helped Blue Marine Foundation analyse the EU’s 2025 fisheries subsidies proposal, informing a joint NGO briefing endorsed by 65 organisations.

The New European MFF

When the European Commission published its proposal for the post-2028 Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) in July 2025, it included a fisheries-specific regulation (COM(2025)559) that immediately raised questions among ocean conservation advocates. Buried in the technical language of subsidy conditionality was a shift that could have significant consequences for how the EU funds its fishing fleets, and for the marine ecosystems those fleets depend on.

Blue Marine Foundation, an organisation working to restore ocean health by reforming the legal and policy frameworks that enable unsustainable fishing, spotted the issue early. Their preliminary analysis suggested that the Commission’s new conditionality language was vaguer than what currently exists under the European Maritime, Fisheries and Aquaculture Fund (EMFAF) Regulation – and that this vagueness could hand Member States more discretion in granting subsidies, potentially weakening safeguards against overcapacity and overfishing.

To turn that instinct into a rigorous legal case, Blue Marine needed specialised input. They turned to Pro Publico, which matched them with Cleary Gottlieb under the leadership of the firm’s Global Pro Bono Counsel & Director Byron Spring.

The Legal Question at the Heart of EU Fisheries Policy

The Commission’s draft proposal states that aid shall not support operators who fail to comply with the WTO Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies or the objectives of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), as set out under Article 43(2) TFEU and Article 2 of the CFP Basic Regulation (EU) No 1380/2013.

That sounds straightforward – but the current EMFAF Regulation (EU) 2021/1139 sets out much more specific conditionality requirements, particularly in Articles 10–12 and 17–20. Blue Marine asked Cleary Gottlieb’s team to:

  • Compare the conditionality provisions of the EMFAF Regulation against the Commission’s 2025 proposal, article by article.
  • Identify precisely where and how the proposed text weakens or omits existing safeguards.
  • Assess the legal implications through the lens of EU State Aid and subsidies law.

This is exactly the kind of granular, comparative legal analysis that advocacy organisations often cannot resource internally – but which can shape how an entire policy debate unfolds in Brussels.

A Note That Did More Than Inform – It Mobilised

Cleary Gottlieb’s pro bono team, including François-Charles Laprévote, Wanjie Lin, Lara Wolf, Johan Stagstrup, Christopher Andersson, Augustin Bourleaud, Doriane Nguenang and Eduard Kayn, delivered a detailed legal note examining the scope and conditionality gaps between the current EMFAF framework and the Commission’s MFF proposal. The note also addressed how the WTO Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies could be integrated into EU law – a question with direct bearing on how rigorously the EU polices harmful subsidies going forward.

According to Elisabeth Druel, who led the project for Blue Marine Foundation, the analysis met every expectation the organisation had going in: “We are very grateful for the advice received on the important EU long-term budget and fisheries subsidies files. It was very clear and has helped us to engage in a meaningful way with EU decision-makers.”

Druel was clear that the quality of the work was what she would have expected for a private or corporate client: the advice was well-written, concise and addressed every issue Blue Marine had raised.

From Legal Analysis to Policy Influence

The real measure of this collaboration’s impact lies in what came next. Cleary Gottlieb’s analysis directly informed Blue Marine Foundation’s contribution to a joint NGO briefing: The Next EU Budget: Investing in Ocean Resilience and Thriving Coastal Communities – a document that has since been endorsed by major civil society actors across the EU.

In other words, a piece of pro bono legal research helped sharpen the advocacy position of a coalition spanning dozens of organisations, at a moment when the EU’s next long-term budget (and the future of its fisheries subsidies regime) is still being negotiated.

This is the kind of outcome that’s easy to overlook in pro bono impact reporting, because it doesn’t come with a tidy metric. As Druel put it, the value of the work was in helping define Blue Marine’s advocacy position on the MFF, not in a number that can be plugged into a spreadsheet. But the scale of the briefing’s endorsement – 65 organisations and counting – speaks to how far that initial legal clarity travelled.

Why This Case Matters

EU fisheries policy sits at a genuine crossroads. The next Multiannual Financial Framework will determine how billions of euros in subsidies are allocated over the coming budget cycle, and whether those subsidies reinforce or undermine the EU’s commitments to sustainable fishing. Getting the legal text right (at the level of individual articles and cross-references) is not a technicality. It’s the difference between a budget that protects ocean health and one that quietly erodes the safeguards built up over the past decade.

This collaboration is a reminder of what’s possible when civil society organisations have access to the kind of specialised legal capacity that major law firms can offer. Blue Marine Foundation came to the table with deep policy expertise and a sharp instinct for where the legal risk lay; Cleary Gottlieb brought the technical rigour to make that instinct legally airtight.

Pro Publico is proud to have facilitated this match – and to see its impact ripple out into a coalition of 65 CSOs shaping the future of EU ocean policy.

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Thanks to @François-Charles Laprévote, @Wanjie Lin, @Lara Wolf, @Johan Stagstrup, @Christopher Andersson, @Augustin Bourleaud, @Doriane Nguenang, @Eduard Kayn, @Byron Spring, C@leary Gottlieb, @Elisabeth Druel, @Blue Marine Foundation, @Francesco Zatelli, @Pro Publico