Background
Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Animal Welfare Institute sued federal agencies and officials in 2024, alleging failure to implement the Marine Mammal Protection Act’s fish-and-fish-product import provisions. The parties settled in January 2025 under an agreement requiring the government to issue comparability findings for foreign fisheries and prohibit imports from fisheries denied those findings.
NMFS denied comparability findings for certain swimming-crab fisheries in Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. After seafood-industry parties separately challenged those denials, the government agreed to delay the planned import ban while reconsidering the findings. Plaintiffs moved to enforce their settlement agreement, contending that the delay violated its terms.
The Court’s Holding
Judge Gary S. Katzmann denied the enforcement motion as moot and dismissed the case without prejudice. During the motion’s pendency, NMFS issued new comparability findings: it found the relevant fisheries in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka comparable to the U.S. program, while maintaining its negative finding for the Philippine fisheries.
NMFS then implemented an import prohibition for fish and fish products from the relevant Philippine swimming-crab fisheries effective June 11, 2026. Because all parties agreed those actions eliminated any live dispute over the requested enforcement, the court held that it lacked a live controversy to decide. It therefore did not reach the government’s sovereign-immunity argument or the parties’ competing interpretations of the settlement agreement.
Key Takeaways
- A settlement-enforcement motion becomes moot when subsequent agency action supplies the practical relief at issue.
- The court did not decide whether the government breached the settlement agreement by delaying the initial import ban.
- The dismissal was without prejudice, and challenges to particular MMPA comparability findings may proceed in other cases.
Why It Matters
The decision closes this enforcement dispute without resolving the scope of the government’s settlement obligations or its asserted sovereign-immunity defense. It confirms that later agency action can foreclose judicial review when no effective relief remains to be awarded.
For fisheries importers and marine-mammal advocates, the substantive comparability determinations remain consequential: the Philippine swimming-crab fisheries are subject to an import prohibition, while the other reconsidered fisheries received positive findings.