The Global Review - Farid Novin

THE LEGAL AND GEOPOLITICAL STATUS OF THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ

Legal Framework, Environmental Risk, and the 2026 Crisis in the Strait of Hormuz

Farid Novin

Revised and Enriched Edition — July 2026

Prepared for G20 Summit Policy Planning & Delegations

 

Executive Summary

The Strait of Hormuz has moved, over the course of 2026, from a standing legal question of maritime governance to the epicentre of a live armed conflict with direct and severe environmental consequences. What began, before February 2026, as a routine international shipping corridor carrying roughly one-fifth of the world's seaborne oil and gas has become the site of naval blockade, mining, missile and drone attacks on commercial vessels, and — as a direct consequence — one of the largest peacetime concentrations of idle, laden oil tankers in modern maritime history.

This revised note responds directly to concerns, raised in prior review, that an exclusively legal treatment of the Strait understates the environmental stakes of the crisis. The note now integrates the documented ecological record of the 2026 disruption — the scale of tanker congestion, the risk of a catastrophic oil spill, and an independent, peer-reviewed warning of a global invasive-species event driven by prolonged vessel lay-up — alongside the pre-existing legal analysis of transit passage, territorial sea geometry, and the contested legality of Iranian and Omani proposals to charge fees on transiting vessels. The result is a fuller account in which genuine, well-evidenced environmental harm and the underlying legal architecture of the Strait are treated as complementary, not competing, concerns.

I. Legal Status: International Waterway Under Contested UNCLOS Interpretation

Is the Strait an international waterway outside UNCLOS?

Under general international law and longstanding custom, the Strait of Hormuz is unequivocally a strait used for international navigation, connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the open ocean. Legally, the Strait falls within Part III of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), specifically Articles 37 through 44, which govern straits used for international navigation and establish the regime of transit passage: continuous and expeditious navigation for commercial and military vessels and aircraft, without suspension.

Iran signed UNCLOS in 1982 but never ratified it. Tehran has consistently maintained — through what international lawyers term a persistent-objector position — that it is not bound by the transit-passage regime, and that the Strait is instead subject to the narrower regime of innocent passage derived from the 1958 Geneva Conventions on the Territorial Sea. Iran's 1993 domestic statute, the Law of Marine Areas of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the Persian Gulf and Oman Sea, formalises this position: it permits Iran to require prior authorisation for the passage of warships and vessels carrying environmentally hazardous cargo, a category that Tehran has at times read to include laden oil tankers.

Sources: Chatham House, "The Strait of Hormuz, shipping, and law" (April 2026); Vajiram & Ravi, "Strait of Hormuz Navigation Fees: Can Iran Legally Charge Ships Under International Law?" (June 2026).

Oman, by contrast, has ratified UNCLOS, though it has attached statements affirming full sovereignty over its territorial sea and reserving the right to require prior notice for warships — reservations that UNCLOS does not, in fact, permit. The broader international community, led by major maritime and G20 economies, maintains that the right of transit passage through the Strait of Hormuz has crystallised into customary international law binding on all states irrespective of UNCLOS ratification. The United States has reinforced this position operationally through its long-standing freedom-of-navigation programme, including transits of guided-missile destroyers through the Strait during the 2026 truce period specifically to assert the point.

II. Geographic Analysis: Dimensions and Territorial Waters

The 24-mile and 21-mile metrics

At its narrowest constriction, between Iran's Larak Island and Oman's Great Quoin Island, the Strait's physical width is approximately 21 nautical miles (roughly 24 statute miles, or 39 kilometres). Both Iran and Oman claim a 12-nautical-mile territorial sea under domestic law and Article 3 of UNCLOS. Because the narrowest section of the Strait is roughly 21 nautical miles wide, while the two states' overlapping 12-nautical-mile claims sum to 24 nautical miles, no belt of high seas or unclaimed Exclusive Economic Zone remains at the centre of the channel.

The entirety of the navigable shipping lanes in the narrowest section therefore falls within the territorial waters of Iran or Oman. This is precisely the geographic reality that the transit-passage regime under UNCLOS Article 37 was designed to address: to prevent nations from being able to close a vital international strait to global commerce simply because their adjacent territorial seas overlap and eliminate any residual high-seas corridor.

III. The 2026 Crisis: From Legal Dispute to Documented Environmental Emergency

The conflict that began on 28 February 2026, when the United States and Israel launched military operations against Iran, transformed the Strait from a subject of legal debate into the site of an active and escalating environmental emergency — one that the first version of this note did not adequately capture. Three distinct, independently documented dimensions of environmental risk have emerged.

1. Tanker congestion and spill risk

An investigation by Greenpeace Germany, using ship-movement data and satellite imagery, found that as of 12 March 2026 at least 85 large oil tankers were blocked in the Persian Gulf carrying a combined total of at least 21 billion litres of oil — a figure that had risen sharply from an estimated 68 tankers and 16 billion litres just six days earlier. Greenpeace's simulation work warned that a spill from any one of these vessels could inflict decades-long damage on Persian Gulf's coral reefs, mangrove forests, and fisheries, with consequences falling disproportionately on coastal communities that had no part in the underlying conflict.

Source: Greenpeace International, "How oil tankers stuck in the Strait of Hormuz south of Iran threatens the Gulf ecosystem" (March 2026).

That risk moved from theoretical to acute in early April 2026, when a Kuwaiti crude tanker was set ablaze at Dubai's port following an Iranian strike that damaged the vessel's hull, prompting conservationists to warn openly of a possible major spill. Reporting on the incident noted that Persian Gulf is the export corridor not only for crude oil but for nitrogen-based fertiliser shipments from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, widening the range of cargo types whose loss would carry environmental as well as economic consequences.

Source: South China Morning Post, "Is the Strait of Hormuz a ticking environmental time bomb?" (April 2026).

2. An independent, peer-reviewed biosecurity warning

Separately from the spill risk, a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Biological Invasions has identified a distinct ecological threat arising specifically from the prolonged idling of vessels rather than from any single accident. Under normal conditions, some 130 to 140 vessels transit the Strait each day, and ships typically spend one to three days in port before departing. Since the crisis began, more than 1,500 large commercial ships have remained idle in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman for periods the authors describe as at least forty times longer than a typical stay.

This unprecedented, extended lay-up allows extensive biofouling — the accumulation of marine organisms on submerged hull surfaces — to build up on an unusually large number of very large vessels with extensive hull area, each of which will eventually resume global voyages. The authors, writing independently of any government or advocacy body, describe the resulting risk as an unparalleled biosecurity threat and call on ship operators, port authorities, and environmental regulators worldwide to prepare now for the eventual dispersal of invasive marine species once the fleet disperses.

Source: Springer Nature Link / Biological Invasions, "Closure of the Strait of Hormuz may trigger a bioinvasion super-spreader event" (2026); see also ABC News, "Scientists warn of possible invasive species superspreader event due to stalling near Strait of Hormuz" (2026).

3. Escalation and blockade dynamics

The scale of the congestion driving both risks is itself a direct product of the conflict's trajectory. The U.S. Congressional Research Service records that average daily transits fell sharply from the pre-war baseline of roughly 130 ships as Iranian forces attacked vessels and required case-by-case negotiated passage; the UK Maritime Trade Operations centre recorded 23 attacks on shipping between 1 March and 29 April 2026 alone, with crew members killed or seriously injured. By late April 2026, an estimated 1,000 ships were held in a holding pattern — roughly 800 inside the Strait awaiting eastbound transit and 200 outside awaiting westbound transit. A ceasefire announced on 7 April 2026 did not require Iran to relinquish operational control of the Strait and did not produce a material outflow of the stranded fleet; a renewed U.S. blockade in the Gulf of Oman followed on 13 April 2026, targeting vessels serving Iranian ports.

Source: Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, "The Strait of Hormuz in Brief: Non-Oil Shipments and Effects on U.S. Shippers" (May 2026).

Taken together, these three strands substantiate the reviewers' underlying concern: the environmental stakes of the Hormuz crisis are not speculative or secondary to the legal question of transit rights. They are large in scale, documented by sources independent of any single government (an environmental NGO, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and a nonpartisan legislative research service), and distinct in kind — spill risk from war damage, and biosecurity risk from the sheer duration of the traffic disruption. Any G20-level assessment of the Strait must treat these as first-order policy concerns in their own right, not merely as a pretext invoked by one party to a territorial or fee dispute..

IV. Environmental Compensation Claims: Distinguishing Genuine Remediation from Contested Levies

Against this backdrop, proposals by Iranian officials to impose environmental charges on transiting vessels deserve a more careful and less dismissive treatment than a purely legal reading might suggest, while still requiring clear analytical distinctions.

The Iranian environmental fee proposal

In mid-2026, the deputy head of Iran's Environmental Protection Organisation, Lahijan-Zadeh, announced that the government had decided to collect the cost of compensating for environmental damage to the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman through charges on ships transiting the Strait. According to state reporting, the draft framework — still under government review before submission to parliament — would calculate fees according to vessel type, tonnage, and cargo, with proceeds directed toward habitat restoration; officials cited the presence of mangrove forests and coral reefs, and noted that more than 22,000 oil tankers transit the Strait annually under normal conditions, as justification for treating the corridor as an environmentally sensitive zone warranting protection independent of the war.

Source: IRNA via WDEF, "Iran planning to impose fees for 'environmental damage' on shipping in Strait of Hormuz" (2026).

The polluter-pays principle and its limits

Under established international environmental law, including the MARPOL Convention and customary law more broadly, the polluter-pays principle is well recognised: where specific commercial vessels, industrial actors, or naval forces cause direct, provable environmental damage — an oil spill, a hull breach from a military strike, deliberate discharge — coastal states have legitimate avenues to seek remediation or compensation from the responsible party. Holding an identified actor accountable for concrete, localised ecological harm it caused is fully consistent with international maritime standards, and the events described in Section III — a tanker struck and set ablaze at Dubai, mines laid in shipping lanes — would in principle support such claims against the parties responsible for that specific damage.

The difficulty with Iran's proposed instrument, and with the broader toll regime discussed below, is not the underlying environmental concern, which the documented record substantiates, but its structure. UNCLOS Article 26 prohibits charges levied on foreign ships solely by reason of passage, permitting fees only for specific services actually rendered to the vessel in question; Article 42 similarly limits the measures a strait state may adopt to those that do not have the practical effect of denying, hampering, or discriminating against transit passage. A general, compulsory levy applied to the entire population of transiting tankers — rather than to the identified party responsible for a specific instance of damage, or in exchange for a concrete service such as pilotage, waste reception, or a convoy escort — sits uneasily with this framework regardless of the legitimacy of the environmental purpose it is said to serve. Maritime legal experts consulted by international press have made a similar point about the broader Iranian fee regime: relabelling a toll as a fee, or as an environmental charge, does not by itself satisfy the "specific services" test that UNCLOS requires.

Source: Audacy News, citing The New York Times, "Iran says Strait of Hormuz will have 'fees'" (June 2026).

A policy conclusion

The appropriate G20 position, in light of the fuller environmental record, is therefore not to dismiss Iranian and Omani environmental concerns as pretextual, but to separate two questions that the current proposals conflate: first, whether the documented ecological risk in Persian Gulf — spill exposure from the stranded fleet, and the biosecurity threat identified by independent researchers — warrants a funded, internationally coordinated remediation and biofouling-management mechanism; and second, whether any littoral state may unilaterally impose a compulsory, blanket charge on lawful transit passage as the vehicle for funding it. The environmental need is real and well evidenced; the specific fee mechanism proposed to address it is legally contested. G20 delegations can and should support the former while continuing to press for the latter to be restructured — for example, through an IMO-administered fund financed by voluntary or negotiated contributions from flag states and shipping interests, rather than a coastal-state-administered levy on transit itself.

the underlying legal dispute addressed in this section, rather than being resolved, has narrowed specifically onto the environmental-charge question analysed in Section IV.

V. The Toll and Fee Dispute: From Wartime Practice to the June 2026 Framework

The environmental-fee proposal cannot be assessed in isolation from the wider toll dispute that developed over the course of the conflict, since the same legal and political dynamics apply to both.

In the early weeks of the closure, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps reportedly began charging vessels directly for passage — reporting in March 2026 put the figure at up to two million dollars per tanker, payable in cash, cryptocurrency, or barter, with roughly 89 to 90 vessels clearing the Strait under this informal approval regime between 1 and 15 March alone. In early April 2026, during a two-week ceasefire, Iran floated a revised proposal for a one-dollar-per-barrel fee on loaded tankers, payable in Chinese yuan or stablecoins, with empty vessels exempted. A formal body, the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, was established around 5–6 May 2026 to administer a per-vessel fee mechanism, with reported charges in the range of one to two million dollars per voyage depending on vessel size, cargo type, and volume — a cost that industry sources note sits on top of war-risk insurance premiums already running two to two-and-a-half million dollars per transit.

Sources: mexc.com news wire reporting on IRGC and Persian Gulf Strait Authority fee mechanisms (March–June 2026); Straits, "Strait of Hormuz Transit Fee: Iran's Hormuz Toll, Explained" (June 2026).

Iran's foreign ministry has consistently characterised these charges as fees for services rendered rather than tolls, a distinction international maritime lawyers have treated with scepticism. A legal analysis published in April 2026 concluded that the imposition of a transit toll on the Strait is unlawful under customary international law predating UNCLOS, and that the discriminatory application of the regime — differing conditions by flag-state nationality — separately breaches UNCLOS Article 42(2), with outright denial of passage to certain flags breaching Article 44. The same analysis noted a genuine enforcement gap: because Iran is not a UNCLOS party, the Convention's Part XV compulsory-arbitration mechanisms do not reach it directly.

Source: Lexology, "Tolling the Strait of Hormuz, Part 1: The International Law Position and the Sanctions Compliance Trap" (April 2026).

Oman, for its part, has occupied a more ambiguous middle position: its foreign minister has publicly rejected mandatory fees while distinguishing them from voluntary charges to shipping companies to fund the maintenance services — environmental, navigational, and safety-related — that Oman states it has provided without charge for years. A parallel Omani proposal, reportedly developed with International Maritime Organization involvement and under review by France and the United Kingdom, has emerged as the principal vehicle through which a negotiated fee structure might yet be formalised on a multilateral rather than unilateral basis.

Source: NBC News, "Iran and Oman propose fee plan for Strait of Hormuz, sources say" (2026).

Washington's own position has not been entirely consistent. President Trump stated at the G7 summit in Évian that the Strait would be "permanently toll-free," and Secretary of State Rubio reiterated that no country may charge tolls or fees on an international waterway; the White House has separately confirmed it regards Iranian-controlled charging as unacceptable in principle, not merely in amount. Notably, however, reporting indicates that the United States itself floated a twenty-percent Hormuz transit fee in mid-July 2026 before dropping the idea in favour of a package of Persian Gulf investment arrangements — an episode that clarifies the actual U.S. objection is to a fee regime controlled by Iran specifically, rather than to the concept of a transit charge as such.

Source: Straits, "Strait of Hormuz Transit Fee: Iran's Hormuz Toll, Explained" (June 2026).

A framework agreement signed by the United States and Iran on 15 June 2026 reopened the Strait to global shipping and lifted the U.S. blockade on Iranian-linked vessels. Under its terms, Iran dropped the standalone per-transit toll administered through the Persian Gulf Strait Authority but has continued to levy both a navigation fee and a separate environmental protection charge — meaning the underlying legal dispute addressed in this section, rather than being resolved, has narrowed specifically onto the environmental-charge question analysed in Section IV.

Source: Vajiram & Ravi, "Strait of Hormuz Navigation Fees: Can Iran Legally Charge Ships Under International Law?" (2026).

Bayesian Perspective. A Bayesian policymaker updates not only legal assessments but also strategic beliefs in light of observed behaviour. The events of 2026 demonstrated that the prior assumption that freedom of navigation could be maintained solely through deterrence requires revision. The posterior assessment suggests that durable stability is more likely to emerge from institutions that alter incentives than from legal declarations alone. The relevant policy question therefore becomes not whether Iran can legally impose fees, but whether an internationally negotiated mechanism can reduce the posterior probability of future disruptions while preserving the principle of freedom of navigation.

VI. Beyond Legal Rights: A Pragmatic Framework for Maritime Stability

The legal analysis presented in the preceding sections leads to a relatively clear conclusion. Under the prevailing interpretation of international maritime law, particularly the customary rules reflected in Part III of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), unilateral tolls or compulsory environmental charges imposed solely by reason of transit through an international strait remain legally contested. The majority view among maritime scholars and major trading states is that the Strait of Hormuz constitutes an international waterway where transit passage cannot be made contingent upon payment of fees unrelated to specific services rendered.

Yet public policy, particularly during periods of geopolitical instability, cannot be guided exclusively by legal doctrine. One of the principal lessons of international political economy is that durable institutions often emerge not from perfect legal consensus but from pragmatic accommodation between legal principles and strategic realities. The events of 2026 illustrate this distinction with unusual clarity. While the legal arguments surrounding transit rights remain important, the conflict demonstrated an equally important empirical fact: irrespective of competing legal interpretations, Iran possesses the practical military capability to disrupt navigation through the Strait of Hormuz for prolonged periods and at enormous economic cost to the international community.

This distinction between de jure rights and de facto capabilities deserves explicit recognition. International law may define what states ought to do, but policymakers must also account for what states are capable of doing. Ignoring either dimension produces incomplete policy. A strategy grounded solely in legal principle risks proving ineffective if it fails to alter incentives, while a strategy based solely on power risks undermining the very legal order that supports global commerce. The challenge for G20 governments is therefore to reconcile these two dimensions through institutional design rather than to privilege one at the complete expense of the other.

From a Bayesian perspective, the 2026 crisis constitutes new information requiring an update of prior assumptions. Before the conflict, many governments implicitly assumed that established legal norms, combined with conventional naval deterrence, were sufficient to guarantee uninterrupted navigation through the Strait. The disruption of commercial shipping, the prolonged congestion of oil tankers, the escalation of environmental risks, and the resulting volatility in global energy markets demonstrated that this prior belief requires revision. Bayesian reasoning does not require abandoning legal principles; rather, it requires incorporating newly observed evidence into future policy design. The posterior assessment is that maintaining maritime stability depends not only upon defending legal norms but also upon creating institutional arrangements that reduce the incentives for future disruption.

The broader objective should therefore be to shift the policy debate away from the binary question of whether Iran possesses a legal right to levy transit fees and toward the more constructive question of how international institutions can reduce the probability of future crises while preserving freedom of navigation. Put differently, the relevant policy issue is not whether one party "wins" the legal argument, but whether the incentives facing all parties can be redesigned so that continued cooperation becomes the dominant strategy.

International experience provides numerous examples of such institutional innovation. Many successful post-conflict settlements have recognized that peace is more durable when former adversaries acquire tangible economic benefits from maintaining cooperation rather than returning to confrontation. The European Coal and Steel Community after the Second World War transformed strategic industries into shared institutions, making renewed conflict economically irrational. International river commissions governing waterways such as the Rhine and Danube similarly evolved from contested sovereignty into cooperative management arrangements because participating states recognized that shared prosperity exceeded the benefits of unilateral control. The underlying lesson is that international stability often emerges not through uncompromising legal victories but through carefully constructed mechanisms that align national incentives with collective welfare.

The Strait of Hormuz presents a similar institutional challenge. The environmental evidence reviewed in earlier sections demonstrates that prolonged disruption creates risks extending well beyond the immediate combatants. Massive tanker congestion, elevated spill risks, and the unprecedented threat of invasive marine species arising from prolonged vessel lay-up represent regional and global environmental externalities. These costs are borne not only by Iran, Oman, and Persian  Gulf states but by the broader international community through higher energy prices, disrupted supply chains, increased insurance costs, and ecological degradation. Consequently, the protection of the Strait increasingly resembles the provision of a global public good rather than a narrow question of national sovereignty.

Viewed from this perspective, an internationally negotiated environmental and navigation contribution merits serious consideration. Such a mechanism would differ fundamentally from a unilateral Iranian toll. Rather than recognizing an unrestricted sovereign authority to tax international navigation, it would establish a multilateral agreement through which users of the Strait contribute modestly toward maintaining environmental protection, navigational safety, and post-conflict ecological restoration under transparent international supervision.

One possible illustration—not as a definitive recommendation but as a basis for negotiation—would involve a uniform contribution of approximately US$1 per barrel of crude oil transported through the Strait, adjusted periodically according to global inflation. Relative to the normal volatility of international oil prices, freight charges, and war-risk insurance premiums, such a contribution would represent only a very small fraction of total transportation costs. Even during periods of relative market stability, daily fluctuations in oil prices routinely exceed this amount. Consequently, the economic burden on consumers and producers would be modest while the cumulative resources generated could provide a stable source of funding for environmental monitoring, habitat restoration, maritime safety infrastructure, and scientific research throughout the Persian Gulf ecosystem.

Equally important is the institutional structure through which such revenues would be managed. The credibility of the mechanism would depend upon ensuring that the proceeds are neither perceived nor used as unrestricted transfers to any government. Instead, revenues should be administered through an independent international framework, ideally coordinated by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in partnership with relevant United Nations environmental agencies and participating littoral states. Independent auditing, transparent reporting, internationally recognized accounting standards, and public disclosure of expenditures would help ensure that funds are directed exclusively toward agreed civilian purposes, including pollution remediation, marine biodiversity conservation, navigational safety, emergency response capabilities, and civilian reconstruction of environmentally damaged infrastructure.

Such safeguards would also address legitimate concerns that financial transfers could inadvertently strengthen military institutions or reward coercive behavior. Indeed, the objective is precisely the opposite. By restricting expenditures to internationally supervised civilian projects, the mechanism would increase the political and economic influence of those constituencies whose interests are tied to stability, environmental stewardship, international trade, and economic reconstruction. Economic development has frequently strengthened more pragmatic political actors by expanding the constituencies that benefit directly from international engagement. Conversely, prolonged isolation, economic stagnation, and recurring crises often reinforce the influence of actors whose political legitimacy derives primarily from confrontation and external threats.

In this sense, the proposed mechanism should not be interpreted as a concession extracted through coercion. Rather, it should be viewed as a carefully designed peace dividend. International negotiations frequently involve reciprocal concessions that create incentives for long-term compliance. The purpose would not be to reward the temporary closure of the Strait but to establish enduring incentives that make future closures progressively less attractive. If maintaining uninterrupted navigation generates predictable economic benefits for all participants—including environmental restoration, civilian reconstruction, and broader international investment—then the expected utility of preserving stability rises while the expected benefits of renewed confrontation decline.

This logic is entirely consistent with Bayesian decision theory. Rational actors continuously revise their strategies in response to changing incentives and observed outcomes. If future policymakers conclude that cooperation produces higher expected returns than confrontation, the posterior probability of future disruptions declines accordingly. In this framework, international institutions do not eliminate conflict by assuming goodwill; they reduce conflict by altering the underlying payoff matrix. A modest, transparent, internationally supervised environmental contribution therefore functions less as a payment for passage than as an investment in reducing systemic geopolitical risk.

The broader geopolitical implications are equally significant. A more stable framework for maritime cooperation could facilitate Iran's gradual reintegration into a wider network of international economic relationships. Increased commercial engagement with a diversified range of trading partners may reduce excessive dependence on any single external power while encouraging broader participation in global markets, environmental cooperation, and multilateral institutions. Economic diversification, foreign investment, and technological collaboration can themselves become stabilizing forces, increasing the domestic opportunity cost of renewed confrontation and making peaceful integration more attractive than strategic isolation.

Ultimately, the objective of G20 policy should not be to choose between legal principle and political realism but to integrate both into a coherent institutional framework. Freedom of navigation remains an essential norm of the international trading system and should continue to be defended. At the same time, the empirical lessons of the 2026 crisis demonstrate that legal declarations alone cannot guarantee maritime stability. Durable peace is more likely to emerge when legal norms are reinforced by incentive-compatible institutions that align the interests of regional actors with those of the international community. An internationally negotiated, transparently administered environmental and navigation mechanism—carefully designed to preserve the principle of transit passage while supporting ecological restoration and civilian reconstruction—offers one possible avenue for achieving precisely that objective. Such an approach neither abandons international law nor rewards coercion; rather, it seeks to transform a recurring strategic confrontation into a framework for cooperative governance that advances environmental protection, regional stability, and the long-term resilience of the global economy.

VII. Policy Recommendations for G20 Delegations

Recommendation 1

Reaffirm that freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz remains a cornerstone of international maritime order and that no state possesses an unrestricted unilateral right to impose transit tolls.

Recommendation 2

Support creation of an International Strait Environmental and Navigation Fund, administered jointly through the IMO and participating states.

Recommendation 3

Consider negotiating a uniform environmental contribution (for example, approximately US$1 per barrel of transported crude, indexed to global inflation) as part of a comprehensive international agreement rather than as a unilateral Iranian charge.

Recommendation 4

Require:  

• independent auditing,  

• transparent accounting,  

• environmental monitoring,  

• reconstruction spending,  

Recommendation 5

Tie continued access to the fund to:

• uninterrupted navigation,  

• compliance with international maritime safety,  

• environmental protection standards.

Recommendation 6

Use the agreement to broaden Iran's economic engagement with multiple international partners, thereby reducing excessive dependence on any single external power and increasing the opportunity cost of renewed disruption.

Sources

Greenpeace International, "How oil tankers stuck in the Strait of Hormuz south of Iran threatens the Gulf ecosystem," March 2026.

South China Morning Post, "Is the Strait of Hormuz a ticking environmental time bomb?", April 2026.

Biological Invasions (Springer Nature), "Closure of the Strait of Hormuz may trigger a bioinvasion super-spreader event," 2026; ABC News coverage of the same study, 2026.

Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, "The Strait of Hormuz in Brief: Non-Oil Shipments and Effects on U.S. Shippers," May 2026.

IRNA via WDEF, "Iran planning to impose fees for 'environmental damage' on shipping in Strait of Hormuz," 2026.

Audacy News (citing The New York Times), "Iran says Strait of Hormuz will have 'fees'," June 2026.

NBC News, "Iran and Oman propose fee plan for Strait of Hormuz, sources say," 2026.

Straits, "Strait of Hormuz Transit Fee: Iran's Hormuz Toll, Explained," June 2026.

Lexology, "Tolling the Strait of Hormuz, Part 1: The International Law Position and the Sanctions Compliance Trap," April 2026.

Vajiram & Ravi, "Strait of Hormuz Navigation Fees: Can Iran Legally Charge Ships Under International Law?", 2026.

Chatham House, "The Strait of Hormuz, shipping, and law," April 2026.

Gulf News, "Strait vs Canal: Why Iran Can't Legally Charge Tolls in the Strait of Hormuz," April 2026.

Eno Center for Transportation, "The Legal Question of Tolling Hormuz," April 2026.

TRT World, "Who controls the Strait of Hormuz? Iran's toll plan could reshape global maritime order," 2026.