On 25 April 2026, the International Chamber of Shipping issued a public statement on the parallel ship seizures conducted at and around the Strait of Hormuz over the past several weeks. Speaking on behalf of the body, marine director John Stawpert characterised the seizures by both the United States and Iran as violations of international law, demanded the release of detained crews, and added a separate sentence that has received less coverage than it deserves: Iran’s stated wish to charge transit tolls in the Strait of Hormuz, Stawpert said, has “no basis in international law” and would “set a dangerous precedent”.
This is the first time the global shipping industry’s principal trade body has named a public position on the toll regime itself, distinct from the seizures, and the position is precisely the one this site’s UNCLOS post from yesterday set out as the legal basis for an alternative authority. The institutional weight of the statement is what is new today.
Who the ICS is, and why its standing matters
The International Chamber of Shipping, founded in 1921, is the principal international trade association for merchant shipowners and operators. Its membership consists of national shipowner associations from approximately 40 countries, which between them represent more than 80 percent of the world’s merchant fleet by tonnage. The Greek Shipowners’ Association, the Liberian flag’s industry counterpart, the United Kingdom Chamber of Shipping, the Chinese Shipowners’ Association, the Japanese Shipowners’ Association, the Norwegian Shipowners’ Association, and the Singapore Shipping Association are among the larger member bodies. The ICS does not have sovereign authority and does not claim it. What it has is operator standing: the institutional voice of the firms whose vessels are paying the cost stack at Hormuz.
This is the gap the UNCLOS post from yesterday identified as a structural feature of the current crisis. Flag states have legal standing under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea but have no forum in which to bring claims, because neither blockading party is a treaty signatory. Operator class participants pay the bills in conventional banking, in war-risk premiums, in spot freight uplift, and in the opaque transit fees collected by the IRGC. They had, until today, no public institutional voice on the legal status of either the seizures or the tolls. The 25 April ICS statement closes that gap. It does not give the operators sovereign standing. It gives them the next best thing: a public position issued by the body that authoritatively represents them as a class.
The two parts of the ICS position
The first part of Stawpert’s statement is that both US and Iranian seizures of merchant vessels in and around the strait are violations of freedom of navigation as enshrined in international law. The vessels named in this category include the Tifani and Majestic X, intercepted by US naval forces in the Indian Ocean and central Arabian Sea, and the MSC Francesca and the Epaminondas, taken by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps inside the Gulf. ICS demands the release of crews, which the International Transport Workers Federation has so far been managing on a small-scale repatriation basis as documented in the seafarer-trapped reporting from earlier this month.
The second part is the more consequential for the site’s institutional argument. Stawpert specifically named the IRGC’s transit toll arrangement and stated that it has no basis in international law. This is a different category of statement from the seizures critique. A seizure is a discrete act, even if repeated. A toll is a regime: a posted fee, a settlement medium, an administered enforcement mechanism, and a stream of receipts. The ICS position is that the regime is structurally illegitimate, not just that any individual transit fee was excessive or improperly applied. The phrasing matters because it is the same logical position that any legitimate alternative authority would have to take, in order to justify its own collection rights.
Why operator-class standing changes the institutional path
A multilateral chokepoint authority is built bottom-up through three layers of consent. The treaty layer requires sovereign signatures and ratification. The operator layer requires that the firms paying the tolls accept the architecture as legitimate. The seafarer layer requires that the flag states and unions representing the crews accept the operational framework. Suez and Panama achieved all three before they were stable. The Northwood track, as discussed in this site’s Paris-Northwood post from earlier this week, is producing the treaty layer in slow motion through a willingness statement and an operational planning conference. The seafarer layer has been spoken for, in a partial way, by the ITF. The operator layer was, as of yesterday, the missing piece.
Today’s ICS statement begins to fill that gap. It is not a treaty. It does not bind any government. What it does is give operator-class consent a public articulation that any future authority can cite. A chokepoint regime that the world’s shipowners formally reject as a matter of public position is, by definition, not durable as a long-run governance arrangement, even if the immediate transit volumes are constrained by the absence of an alternative.
The signalling path from ICS to flag states to governments
The ICS statement now opens a path that did not exist last week. Member national associations, including those of the major open-registry flag states, can cite the ICS position when raising the Hormuz arrangement with their respective governments. The Greek Shipowners’ Association, which represents the largest national fleet by ownership tonnage in the world, can take the position to the Hellenic Ministry of Maritime Affairs. The Liberian-flag industry counterpart can take it to the Liberian Maritime Authority. The Marshall Islands and Panama have parallel structures. Each of these flag states has UNCLOS standing. Each has a domestic political constituency that will hear from its national shipowners’ association.
This is the layered domino structure on which institutional change in maritime governance has historically advanced. The 1899 Hague conferences on maritime law were preceded by industry-association advocacy. The 1948 founding of what became the IMO was preceded by ICS’s predecessor body’s advocacy. The 1982 UNCLOS treaty was preceded by industry-coalition statements through the 1970s. The pattern is consistent: industry standing precedes treaty action by months to years, but it is the necessary precursor.
The contrast with the Suez and Panama models
The Suez Canal Authority and the Panama Canal Authority operate transit toll regimes that the ICS does not contest. The reason is institutional rather than substantive. Both are treaty-backed bodies with published rate schedules, audited treasuries, named legal jurisdictions, and recognised dispute-resolution forums. Operators may negotiate, contest individual charges, or lobby for rate changes through their national associations and through ICS itself. They do not contest the existence of the toll, because the toll is the receipt mechanism of an institutional service that they recognise as legitimate.
The site’s proposed rate schedule for Hormuz is structured to fit this same operator-recognised model. A four-to-six hundred thousand US dollar toll on a fully loaded VLCC, denominated in dollars, paid through correspondent banking, deposited at a named institution, audited under a treaty framework, would not draw an ICS rejection statement. It would draw the same conventional negotiation that operators pursue at Suez and Panama. The comparison page sets out the receivables structure for both. The calculator lets any operator price a transit against the proposed schedule.
What is genuinely new today
The ICS statement is not a sovereign act. It does not change the operational reality at Hormuz on 25 April, where 19 vessels transited compared to 5 the previous day, while the toll regime, the dual blockade, and the war-risk premium structure remain in place. What it changes is the institutional record. The body that authoritatively represents the world’s shipowners has now publicly declared that the current arrangement is structurally illegitimate, and that the alternative would be a regime with international-law backing.
That is the institutional ground the site has been arguing from since the calculator was first published. The argument now has a co-signatory of consequence. The path from where the crisis is on 25 April to where a treaty-backed authority sits in some future month runs through a sequence of further institutional acts. Today’s ICS statement is one of them.
Sources: International Chamber of Shipping public statement of 25 April 2026 via Al Jazeera Shipping News and The Tribune of India; John Stawpert remarks as marine director of ICS; Stocktwits coverage of the ICS position on US-Iran seizures; Al Jazeera’s 23 April analysis of how Iran has captured ships; International Transport Workers Federation reporting on seafarer repatriation; the Constantinople Convention of 1888 and the Suez Canal Authority’s contemporary statutes; the Torrijos-Carter Treaties of 1977 and the Panama Canal Authority’s enabling legislation; UN Convention on the Law of the Sea ratification list via the UN Treaty Collection.