Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer will chair a 40-nation leaders' video conference on 17 April to operationalise the Élysée joint statement of 8 April, which committed 21 governments and EU institutions to "ensure freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz" and demanded a ceasefire "including in Lebanon". Signatories include France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Japan, Australia, Canada and EU institutions. A preparatory diplomatic call is scheduled for 16 April, and the Élysée agenda has added financial sanctions on Iran if Hormuz remains closed.
The Élysée, the French presidential palace, is the publisher of the only signed multilateral text to emerge from the post-war phase. It exists because the United States produced none: The White House presidential-actions page still records zero Iran instruments since 6 February. The 40-nation framework grew out of the UK-led Hormuz coordination coalition that Washington declined to anchor, and it sits on European legal ground the European Union laid down when it rejected Trump's Hormuz toll joint-venture on 12 April citing the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
In international maritime law the first credible multilateral framework usually holds. Subsequent arrangements adopt it, modify it, or negotiate against it, but rarely displace it outright. The Paris conference follows earlier joint statements that produced no ships, now backed by the Macron-Starmer announcement that convened it. Adding Iran sanctions to the Paris agenda narrows the gap between the European pressure track and the American one, this time executed under signed text rather than posted on a president's social-media account.
Flag-state politics carry the structural consequence. France and Japan have already lodged UNCLOS protests against the toll-interdiction list their vessels appeared on; the Paris document gives those protests a multilateral spine. Once 40 nations sign a Hormuz passage framework, any subsequent US arrangement either reaches into that framework or argues round it. The former requires Washington to come to Paris; the latter requires a US instrument Washington has not written.
