before Greece's accession to the General Act, was stated to be subject to
two reservations:
"(a) disputes relating to the territorial status of Greece, including
disputes relating to its rights of sovereignty over its ports and lines
of communication;
(b) disputes relating directly or indirectly to the application of treaties or conventions accepted by Greece and providing for another
procedure".
It can hardly be supposed that Greece should at the same time have
intended to give a scope to its reservation of "disputes relating to the
territorial status of Greece" which differed fundamentally from that given
to it both in the General Act and in its declaration under the optional
clause. That Greece should have had such an intention seems al1 the more
improbable in that in 1934 and again in 1939 it renewed its declaration
under the optional clause without modifying in any way the form of its
reservation of "disputes relating to the territorial status of Greece".
58. The Greek Government has suggested that an improvement in the
political climate of the time enabled Greece to dispense with an autonomous reservation of disputes relating to its territorial status, and to content
itself with the integration of those disputes into its domesticjurisdiction
reservation. But this would not explain why Greece should then have
maintained an autonomous reservation of disputes relating to territorial
status in its acceptance of the optional clause. Another difficulty is that
accession to the General Act involved an even wider risk of claims than
acceptance of the optional clause; for the pacific settlement procedures of
the General Act are not limited to the judicial settlement of legal disputes.
They also provide for conciliation with respect to disputes "of every kind",
and even for the possibility, under certain conditions, of arbitration of
political disputes on the basis that the arbitrators may decide ex aequo et
bono. It hardly seems likely, therefore, that Greece should have intended to
have curtailed the protection given by its reservation of disputes relating to
territorial status, when subjecting itself to the wider range of procedures
contained in the Act.
59. Equally unconvincing is a suggestion that, although the scope of the
"territorial status" reservation was reduced by its incorporation in the
reservation of questions of domesticjurisdiction, Greece thereby obtained
a "reinforced barrage", a "qualitatively enhanced protection" and a "doubly-bolted" door against the claims which it was particularly concerned to
guard against. This suggestion takes no account of the legal implications of
incorporating "disputes relating to territorial status" into a reservation of
questions of "domestic jurisdiction", as these had been explained by the
Permanent Court in 1923 in its .Advisory Opinion on the Nationality
Decrees Issued in Tunis and Morocco (P.C.I.J., Series B, No. 4). The