IMO Secretary-General Arsenio Dominguez published a formal statement on 17 April invoking the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and explicitly rejecting "tolls, fees or discriminatory transit measures" on international straits1. The statement disclosed 20,000 seafarers and 2,000 vessels trapped in The Persian Gulf; each idle hull is accruing hire-day costs that compound whether or not it moves. Crews run out of food and fuel before governments run out of patience.
Dominguez also surfaced the 1968 Traffic Separation Scheme, a tripartite framework agreed between Iran, Oman and the IMO that has governed movement through the strait for 58 years. A new framework drafted today writes on a page that already has signatures. The officers convening at Northwood, the UK's Permanent Joint Headquarters, inherit a legal architecture older than most of the rules-of-engagement planners in the room.
The planners are drafting operating rules for a 51-nation coalition behind the Hormuz freedom-of-navigation mission, and they must either incorporate the 1968 scheme or supersede it. In international maritime law the first credible framework usually holds while later ones negotiate against it. The Paris posture bound deployment to "strictly defensive, when conditions are met", language that ties the mission to whatever ceasefire architecture emerges and inherits the Paris political ceiling before the operational ceiling is written.
The Grossi counter-point, that verification without inspectors is an illusion, applies equally here: maritime rules without a littoral signature are rules a warship cannot cite at sea. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council have not signed on, and the United States is not at the table. A counter-view from European naval jurists is that UNCLOS Article 38 on transit passage gives Northwood enough standing to operate without Gulf signatures; that reading still does not solve the enforcement question when a Gulf coastguard refuses to coordinate.
