Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei ruled transit fees out of the shipping route talks with Oman on Monday 10 August, and named four areas that are under discussion: monitoring, environmental protection, maritime services and crime1. A joint statement still waits on technical points.
Baqaei first described this bilateral channel in May, when he said the two governments were in continuous consultations following an expert-level meeting in Muscat. Three months on, those four headings are the first content the mechanism has produced in public. Iran and Oman administer the strait between them under a 1968 agreement that predates the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which is why a co-signed arrangement carries legal weight that a scheme Tehran writes alone does not.
Ruling out a charge for passage answers the loudest Western objection to anything Iran proposes for the waterway. A toll looks like payment for transit that shipping law does not permit; monitoring, pilotage and pollution rules look like two coastal states doing their jobs. That distinction is the whole argument, and Baqaei has just conceded the point without conceding the strait.
Iranian and Western officials described this same mechanism in incompatible terms on 5 August. Neither Muscat nor Washington has confirmed Baqaei's version, and until one of them publishes something, four headings and a pending joint statement are what exists.
