Iran's Persian Gulf Strait Authority launched an official X account and a live vessel-submission portal on 18 May 2026, demanding ownership details, insurance, crew manifests, cargo declarations and routing for a transit permit through the Strait of Hormuz. Euronews reported the launch the same day1. The body is IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps)-backed and answers to the Majlis, Iran's parliament. PGSA replaces a parliamentary mechanism Azizi posted as legislative intent two days earlier with a working administrative interface that ships now have to engage with one way or another.
the strait of Hormuz is the 33-km chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of seaborne oil moves each day. Permit systems there are not a matter of fee schedules alone; they reset who counts as the gatekeeper. Euronews relayed a market-reported figure of up to $2 million per transit in yuan-denominated fees2, though PGSA has not published an official tariff. The absence of a public price list means insurance underwriters and tanker owners are bidding into a system whose terms are still being written by the office collecting them.
For the 26-nation coalition that signed the Hormuz joint statement on 12 May, the PGSA portal is the first hard test of UNCLOS Article 38 transit-passage rights against a sovereign administrative system. UNCLOS (UN Convention on the Law of the Sea) Article 38 protects freedom of transit through international straits, but it presumes the strait state is not running a permit office. Once a vessel registers with PGSA, even under protest, the coalition's legal frame stops being an open-seas argument and becomes a treaty dispute over a working bureaucracy.
