CommentaryMODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC, Public domain,ration claims, finance maritime services, and place Iran and Oman at the center of a durable settlement — all without turning wartime leverage into permanent authority over third-state shipping
Two rival claims of control are hardening around the Strait of Hormuz. By Aug. 14, transit had almost ground to a standstill. Washington said it could maintain its blockade of Iranian ports indefinitely. Tehran continued to link a full reopening to steps by the United States, while Iran’s Parliament advanced a domestic framework for the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf.
Yet the technical and political tracks are moving in opposite ways. Iran and Oman have agreed on the coordinates of a prospective route, and Tehran says their arrangement is in its final stages. But a route is not a reopening. Implementation remains tied to a wider bargain with Washington on which mediators have made no discernible progress.
The map may be nearing completion while the passage remains politically blocked.
The real contest is therefore larger than closure or tolls. It is whether wartime leverage can be converted into durable administrative authority: who may regulate passage, demand payment, or exclude vessels; against whom; on what legal basis; and for how long.
International law does not require a choice between ignoring Iran’s losses and accepting an Iranian permission system. It can protect valid reparation claims, recognize the operational responsibilities of Iran and Oman, and support payment for real services. What it cannot do is merge four different legal relationships into a single power to decide who may pass.
Hormuz needs administration. It does not need a gatekeeper.
Four relationships, four legal tests
The first relationship is state responsibility and reparation. A state responsible for an internationally wrongful act must make full reparation for the injury caused. Nothing in the law of international straits extinguishes a valid claim.
The second is payment for actual maritime services. Pilotage, towage, wreck removal, emergency assistance, hydrographic work, navigational aids, and pollution response all cost money. A charge is strongest when it corresponds to a defined service requested by, or individually supplied to, an identifiable vessel; is transparent, non-discriminatory, and cost-related; and is not a condition of passage. Paying for help is not the same as buying permission to pass.
The third is public administration of navigation: coordinating movement, safety, emergency capacity, and environmental protection. These are not concessions to coastal states. They are necessary governmental functions in a congested and environmentally vulnerable waterway.
The fourth is security action. Self-defense, the law of armed conflict, maritime enforcement, and countermeasures have different triggers, targets, and limits. Invoking one cannot supply the legal authority missing from another.
Diplomacy may bargain across all four. Law must keep their tests separate because each connects a different right-holder, duty-bearer,ercion can be recast as permanent administration
That is the line between administration and gatekeeping.
Domestic law cannot settle an international strait
Iran’s parliamentary initiative matters because institutions can outlast the emergency that produced them. Parliament formally received a proposal on strategic action for security and sustainable development in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf on July 13. The National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, acting as the principal committee, approved its general framework without a dissenting vote and began examining the text. The Construction Commission and Councils and Internal Affairs Commission also endorsed the general principles. A later parliamentary account says roughly 14 proposals were consolidated into a 14-article comprehensive text.
This is substantial legislative movement, but it is not enacted law. Committee approval is not approval by Parliament in plenary, and any parliamentary approval would still face the constitutional review required by Article 94. Public descriptions of selective vessel management, restrictions associated with states designated as hostile, and payments for maritime services reveal the direction of debate, not rules already in force.
There is no public evidence that parliamentary resistance explains the pace. The principal committee vote was unanimous, and a member of its bureau reported agreement among relevant executive bodies on the need for legislation. Nor does the record support a simple legislature-executive clash. The Foreign Ministry says it is coordinating with Parliament and participating in the review; Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has met the commission; and Parliament’s Speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, has also served as Iran’s chief negotiator in this process.
Those facts do not prove why the bill has not moved faster. They do make sequencing more plausible than obstruction. A temporary Iran-Oman route can remain negotiable while a permanent domestic framework is shaped. Law and diplomacy may be moving on different clocks so that neither prematurely forecloses the other.
The institutional premise is sound. Iran needs legislation to identify competent agencies, allocate authority, govern public funds, and provide administrative and judicial review. A coastal state cannot manage a complex maritime environment through improvisation.
But domestic law and international law answer different questions. A statute can direct Iranian authorities; it cannot, by its own force, determine what Oman, a foreign-flagged vessel, or a third state must accept. It can organize power at home. It cannot manufacture legal opposability abroad.
Geography sets a further limit. Hormuz is not an exclusively Iranian administrative space. Oman is the other indispensable coastal state, and the international routing scheme crosses waters of both. Any durable arrangement that marginalizes either state is operationally unrealistic. Neither state’s indispensable role, however, amounts to ownership of the international passage.
Administration in peace and war
The treaty position is asymmetric. Oman is a party to UNCLOS. Iran signed but has not ratified the Convention and declared at signature that only parties should benefit from what it regarded as contractual rights, including transit passage. The United States has not ratified it. That asymmetry matters; it does not create a legal vacuum.
In Corfu Channel, the International Court of Justice recognized passage through straits used for international navigation in time of peace and rejected prior authorization as a necessary incident of coastal sovereignty. UNCLOS Part III later supplied the modern functional architecture: coastal regulation of defined subjects without discrimination or the practical denial, hampering, or impairment of transit passage, alongside cooperation over navigational aids and pollution prevention.
Armed conflict changes the applicable analysis, particularly for belligerent vessels and military operations, but it does not erase navigation law. The San Remo Manual, a non-binding expert restatement of the law of naval warfare, provides that transit-passage rights continue during armed conflict; neutral merchant vessels also retain protection unless specific legal grounds make them liable to attack or capture.
One need not settle the customary status of every UNCLOS provision to see the controlling distinction. The International Maritime Organization’s Council applied it to Hormuz in its July 13 resolution: passage through the recognized traffic scheme should be non-discriminatory, unimpeded, and free of tolls and charges, while coastal traffic measures should comply with IMO rules.
Administration answers how passage occurs: lanes, reporting, collision avoidance, environmental standards, hazard warnings, emergency communications, and rescue.
Gatekeeping decides whether an otherwise entitled vessel may pass, whether by prior political permission, exclusion by flag or alignment, a general access charge, compulsory purchase of unnecessary services, or an indefinite security veto. The label attached to a measure is not decisive. Its practical effect is.
Iran-Oman diplomacy should be judged by that test. Their joint statement commits both coastal states to safe passage, an open waterway, and talks on future administration, services, and related costs in accordance with international standards. That is a legitimate agenda.
The negotiations are bilateral in form but triangular in political effect. Tehran has connected implementation to action by Washington; Washington has linked lifting its blockade to an arrangement that restores unimpeded commercial shipping. Oman is not a US proxy or representative. It is a sovereign coastal state with its own interests, legal responsibilities, and mediating role. Political linkage may be unavoidable. Legal merger is not.
Claims against states, rules for ships
Iran’s war losses cannot be dismissed in the name of commercial normality. If internationally wrongful conduct and the resulting injury are established, Iran may pursue reparation from the responsible state or states through interstate compensation, arbitration, a claims commission, reconstruction arrangements, or another agreed mechanism. Restoring navigation while pretending those claims do not exist would leave the central dispute intact.
But reparation has a structure: responsible state, injured state, breach, attribution, causation, and injury. The debtor cannot be chosen because it happens to sail past.
Countermeasures do not remove that discipline. Under the Articles on State Responsibility, they are directed against the responsible state, intended to induce compliance rather than punish, proportionate, and temporary. Indiscriminate burdens on third-state shipping, or restrictions detached from a defined route back to compliance, are correspondingly difficult to defend as countermeasures.
The same discipline applies to the United States. Freedom of navigation does not answer Iran’s sovereignty, security, or reparation claims, and it does not itself authorize blockade, boarding, interdiction, redirection, or force. Each measure requires an independent legal basis and remains constrained by the law governing force, armed conflict, and the rights of third states and vessels.
Coastal sovereignty is not a blank check for Iran. Freedom of navigation is not one for Washington.
A memorandum is not a passage code
The June Islamabad Memorandum sits between the military conflict and the institutional contest over Hormuz. Its legal character remains uncertain: the publicly available copy is marked as a draft, while Oman’s Foreign Ministry describes it as signed. Its operation has collapsed: Washington declared it over, Iran suspended its commitments, and hostilities resumed. That does not by itself resolve whether any legal obligations survive. If the memorandum is a treaty, armed conflict does not automatically terminate it; if it is a political commitment, treaty doctrine does not decide its status.
For Hormuz, the narrower point is more important. Paragraph 5 contemplated commercial passage without charge for 60 days, Iranian demining, and Iran-Oman dialogue over future administration and maritime services. Paragraph 6 separately contemplated a reconstruction and development plan for Iran of at least $300 billion. Their proximity makes them part of one political bargain; it does not turn reconstruction finance into consideration owed by every future ship.
On Washington’s account, the 60-day period began on June 18. Even if that timetable governs, its expiry would limit only the undertaking stated in the memorandum; it would not, by negative implication, create authority to charge third-state shipping on day 61.
Nor can the memorandum bind the world. If it is a treaty, the third-state rule reflected in Article 34 of the Vienna Convention prevents it from imposing obligations on non-parties without their consent. If it is political, its prescriptive reach is weaker still. Suspension cannot enlarge what the instrument granted, and Washington cannot detach navigation promises from the reciprocal bargain and treat them as freestanding obligations.
Build a service, not a permission system
A durable arrangement should abandon the vocabulary of control and begin with functions.
Iran and Oman should lead a joint coastal mechanism for navigation safety, hydrographic information, hazard notification, search and rescue, pollution response, emergency communications, and the recognized traffic separation scheme. Their leadership would follow from geography, capacity, and exposure to risk, not proprietary ownership of the strait. The IMO should anchor technical standards and any changes to routing. User states and industry should participate without acquiring a veto over coastal jurisdiction.
Recent pollution incidents show why standing arrangements matter. After an oil slick near Qeshm was linked to the Minoan Pioneer, a salvage tug reportedly could not approach while permission from Iranian authorities remained unresolved. Separately, the massive Caroline Bezengi spill off Oman — not linked to the war — exposed the scale of the region’s shared environmental risk. Emergency assistance cannot safely depend on improvised access after damage occurs.
The Straits of Malacca and Singapore offer a useful principle, not a template to copy mechanically. Their Cooperative Mechanism joins coastal states, user states, and industry, while contributions to navigational infrastructure are voluntary and separate from transit passage. Hormuz could use an independently audited joint fund for navigational aids, rescue capacity, pollution control, and environmental monitoring. Non-payment could not alter entitlement to pass.
The legal test is practical. A voluntary payment with no consequence for passage is a contribution. A cost-related fee for a defined service requested or individually supplied is a service transaction. A payment whose refusal changes whether or how a vessel may pass is an access condition, whatever its name.
Reparation should remain in a separate institutional channel directed at the responsible state or states. Security restrictions should identify the threat, legal basis, target, geographic scope, necessity, proportionality, duration, review mechanism, and endpoint. Iranian legislation could strengthen the whole architecture through published rules, transparent accounts, a clear division between service provision and enforcement, administrative and judicial review, and an international-law savings clause.
These constraints would not diminish Iranian sovereignty. They would convert power exercised in crisis into authority capable of surviving legal scrutiny.
The strait cannot become the settlement
The deepest danger at Hormuz is institutional conversion. Iran has learned that disruption creates extraordinary leverage. The United States has demonstrated the pressure created by naval power over Iranian maritime access. Each may be tempted to convert a temporary advantage into a permanent entitlement: Iran through permission, exclusion, and payment; the United States through an enduring supervisory or interdiction role presented as protection of navigation.
International law should refuse both claims. Coastal states may administer. User states may cooperate and help fund common infrastructure. Responsible states must answer valid reparation claims. Genuine services may be charged for, and concrete threats may justify tailored, temporary measures. None of those propositions requires turning passage into permission.
Once the categories are fused, every dispute in the wider conflict migrates into the strait. War damage becomes a shipping charge. Sanctions become navigation restrictions. Security policy becomes permanent licensing. Commercial vessels become proxies for their flag states. A waterway becomes a balance sheet for grievances accumulated elsewhere.
Hormuz can be administered jointly, seriously, and effectively, with Iran and Oman in the central place their geography and responsibilities require.
But the strait itself cannot become the settlement.
It cannot lawfully become a gate through which the debts, sanctions, alliances, and grievances of the wider conflict are collected from every ship that passes.
Mojtaba Touiserkani is an independent researcher and international relations scholar with a Ph.D. from the University of Tehran. His work focuses on Middle East security dynamics and US–Iran relations.
Opinions expressed in JURIST Commentary are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JURIST’s editors, staff, donors or the University of Pittsburgh.
