The EU puts sharks at risk.

When signatories to the Barcelona Convention on Mediterranean pollution gathered in Paris last week, the countries on the sea’s southern and eastern shores arrived having done their homework. The EU, however, showed up full of excuses.

In theory, the meeting was going to add various species of sharks and rays to the convention’s list of protected species. But though north African countries such as Algeria, Libya and Morocco came to Paris with approved mandates to sign the agreement, the EU did not. Instead, the EU, which likes to think of itself as a beacon of enlightened environmental thinking to the rest of the world, had been squabbling over whether the protection of shark species was properly the business of a council of environment ministers or of fisheries ministers.

To compound the EU’s discomfort, the European Commission did not come up with a draft negotiating mandate until the day before the meeting in Paris. And the mandate was worthless to negotiators because it had not been approved by ministers. So the Paris meeting ended with no agreement on an issue that all parties were ready to sign up to, if only they could work out who was to hold the EU’s pen (the environment ministers).

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It will be two years before the next conference of the parties to the convention but the Commission is hoping to invoke a clause in the convention to get a decision taken retrospectively – at some point in the next six months.

In the meantime, say the biodiversity campaigners, four critically endangered species of shark may disappear.