Iran’s foreign ministry calls the US Navy’s interdiction of the Touska and the Tifani “piracy”. The US State Department calls Iran’s one-dollar-per-barrel transit toll “illegal extortion by a sanctioned entity”. They are arguing over the definition and enforcement of maritime law under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, a 1982 treaty that neither of them has ratified. That is the institutional core of the present crisis. Two state actors are conducting a dual blockade of roughly one-fifth of global seaborne energy, invoking legal norms drawn from a treaty they have both explicitly declined to join.
Neither party is bound by the framework they invoke
UNCLOS was opened for signature in December 1982 and entered into force in November 1994. It has 169 parties today, including every major European state, China, Russia, Japan, India, Australia, Egypt, South Africa, and every Latin American state with a coastline. Iran signed in December 1982 but has never ratified. The United States has never signed. The US position originated with the Reagan administration’s objection to Part XI on deep-seabed mining, and it has been reaffirmed by every subsequent administration despite repeated bipartisan Senate testimony in favour of ratification. The US Navy operationally treats customary international law as equivalent to UNCLOS for freedom-of-navigation purposes, but this is a unilateral interpretation rather than a treaty commitment. Iran’s position is more opaque, combining sovereignty arguments about the Strait of Hormuz with intermittent invocations of UNCLOS concepts when convenient.
The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, headquartered in Hamburg and established under Annex VI of UNCLOS, is the treaty’s dedicated dispute-resolution forum. It has no jurisdiction over non-parties. A US or Iranian interdiction of a vessel flying a third-country flag produces no case at ITLOS because the flag state cannot compel either of the interdicting parties to appear.
What this means for the trapped flag states
The vessels currently trapped in the Persian Gulf are flagged overwhelmingly to UNCLOS parties. Greece, Liberia, the Marshall Islands, Panama, and Malta, the five largest open-registry flag states by tonnage, are all UNCLOS parties with functioning maritime administrations and consular structures. A Greek-flagged tanker seized under the US Iran-linked-vessel authorisation framework has no tribunal it can appeal to. Greece, as the flag state, has no standing to bring a case against a non-party. A Liberian-flagged vessel detained at an Iranian anchorage under IRGC inspection protocol faces the same asymmetry in reverse. The International Transport Workers Federation’s consular substitution work, which has repatriated 450 of the roughly 20,000 stranded seafarers, is filling a gap that a treaty regime would assign to specified state actors with treaty-backed obligations.
Article 101 of UNCLOS defines piracy narrowly as acts “committed for private ends by the crew or passengers of a private ship”. State-conducted interdictions, lawful or unlawful, are by definition not piracy under the treaty’s operative language. Iran’s rhetorical use of the word is pointed but not legally operative, and no flag state has yet filed a formal diplomatic protest using the piracy framework, because doing so would require arguing that the United States is an outlaw actor under a treaty the US has never signed. The rhetorical loop has a dead end built into it.
The US boarding authority for the Touska and the Tifani derives from customary international law interpretations, specifically the right of visit codified in UNCLOS Article 110 and a parallel customary body addressing stateless vessels and vessels engaged in sanctions evasion. The US is relying on treaty language without being bound by the treaty’s dispute-resolution mechanism. This is not new. It has been the consistent US posture on UNCLOS since 1983. What is new is the scale of the interdictions, which has turned a latent legal ambiguity into a visible institutional gap.
What a treaty-backed chokepoint authority actually is
The Suez Canal Authority draws its jurisdiction from the 1888 Constantinople Convention, reinforced and operationally modernised by Egypt’s ratification of UNCLOS in 1983 and by successive bilateral exchanges with the major user states. The Panama Canal Authority operates under the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties, with the handover structure completed on 31 December 1999. Both are treaty bodies. Both publish their rate structures in advance. Both maintain finances that are audited by external firms and reviewed by their respective legislatures. Flag states have clear recourse if a vessel is detained outside published protocol. Dispute resolution is specified in the governing instruments.
The current Hormuz cost stack, as documented in this site’s proposed rate schedule and the per-VLCC calculator, is collected and disbursed outside any legal framework that either blockading party would enforce against itself. That is not simply an economic pathology. It is a treaty gap. The war-risk premium collected by Lloyd’s syndicates is legally enforceable under English law. The IRGC toll collected in Tether on the Tron blockchain is enforceable under no legal framework at all, only under the operational consequence of non-payment. Suez’s eight hundred thousand dollar toll on an equivalent VLCC transit is enforceable under the Constantinople Convention framework and modern Egyptian law. The comparison is not between three prices. It is between three institutional structures.
What the Paris coalition produced, and did not produce
The 10 April Paris Summit communique produced a willingness statement from 22 countries, expanded to include Japan at the 17 April Northwood follow-up, to participate in a Hormuz mine-clearance and escort architecture. What it did not produce was a treaty draft. The distinction is operational, not cosmetic. A willingness statement is a political signal. It can be repudiated by a successor government, amended unilaterally, or allowed to lapse without formal consequence. A treaty is a legally binding instrument with a dispute-resolution forum and a ratification record. No Hormuz treaty draft has been circulated publicly as of the date of this post. Until one is, the Paris coalition is a collection of willing states rather than a functioning authority.
A legitimate chokepoint authority is first a treaty, second a rate schedule, third a set of services. Without the first, the second and third are negotiable assertions rather than enforceable commitments. The Northwood willingness statement is necessary. It is not sufficient. The next procedural step, if the governance vacuum is to be filled by the coalition that has so far engaged the problem, is a draft convention on Hormuz transit governance, opened for signature under conventional multilateral procedures, with ITLOS or an equivalent body specified as the dispute-resolution forum. That step has not been taken.
The question the trapped flag states are actually asking
The flag administrations of Greece, Liberia, the Marshall Islands, Panama, and Malta are, in their quiet bilateral exchanges with the coalition members, not asking for a lower transit toll. They are asking under what treaty any transit toll collected at Hormuz would be legally enforceable and lawfully auditable. The one-dollar-per-barrel IRGC toll is visibly neither. The four-to-six-hundred-thousand-dollar figure proposed in this site’s rate schedule is a model of what a treaty-enforceable toll would look like, priced to fund the full suite of services that Suez and Panama deliver under their treaty instruments. The calculator lets any flag administration or shipowner run its own fleet through the model. The question it answers is not “what would the transit cost”. The question it answers is “what would the transit cost under a regime that meets the flag state’s own treaty obligations”.
The UNCLOS vacuum is the reason the crisis has persisted. It is also the reason a durable resolution requires more than a ceasefire. A ceasefire reopens the water. A treaty reopens the water with a published rule book, an auditable treasury, and a dispute forum. Without the second, the first is a pause rather than a resolution.
Sources: Penningtons Law firm brief on the legality of the Iran and US blockades; NPR’s 18 April interview with an international maritime law expert on the US blockade of Iranian ports; Al Jazeera’s 22 April analysis “Iran calls US ship seizure piracy: Is it”; the UN Treaty Collection ratification list for UNCLOS; ITLOS jurisdictional documentation via the Hamburg registry; the Constantinople Convention of 1888 and contemporary Suez Canal Authority statutes; the Torrijos-Carter Treaties of 1977 and the Panama Canal Authority enabling legislation; the Paris Summit communique of 10 April 2026 and the Northwood willingness statement of 17 April 2026; International Transport Workers Federation reporting on seafarer repatriation figures.