Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said on Thursday 13 August that any future administration of the strait of Hormuz must include payment for environmental damage, putting the cumulative harm to Iran's coastal areas in the trillions of dollars1. Oil had washed onto Qeshm Island, off Iran's southern coast, the day before. "Every party that benefits from commercial shipping through the strait of Hormuz carries both a legal and a moral obligation to remediate the environmental harm inflicted upon The Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman," he said. He named no ship, no flag and no government.
Three days earlier the same spokesman ruled transit fees out of the Oman talks and named four working areas, one of them environmental protection. That sequence matters because a charge for passage runs straight into the transit-passage right that every maritime state cites against Iran, the objection that has sunk each fee proposal since the spring.
A remediation claim carries no such problem. Framed as damage owed rather than a price paid, it needs no ceasefire, no counterparty signature and no naval success to stay alive, and it can be tabled at any point a waterway arrangement is drafted. The trillions figure is Baqaei's own characterisation, offered without a party to bill or a period to bill for, and it is worth nothing as a valuation. The shape of the claim will outlive the war that produced it.
