32 AEGEAN SEA (JUDGMENT) Greece" in reservation (b) is to be understood as a generic term denoting any matters properly to be considered as comprised within the concept of territorial status under general international law, and therefore includes not only the particular legal régime but the territorial integrity and the boundaries of a State. It is therefore in accordance with this interpretation of the words "disputes relating to the territorial status of Greece" that the Court is called on to determine whether reservation (b) does or does not have the effect of excluding the present dispute from the scope of Greece's accession to the General Act of 1928. 77. The Greek Government, however, has advanced a further historical argument by which it seeks to convince the Court that there can be no question of the applicability of reservation (b) with respect to the present dispute. This is that the very idea of the continental shelf was wholly unknown in 1928 when the General Act was concluded, and in 1931 when Greece acceded to the Act. It also refers in this connection to the arbitral award in the Petroleum Development Ltd. v. Sheikh of Abu Dhabi case (International L a w Reports 1951, p. 144 at p. 152), where the arbitrator held that the grant of a minera1 oil concession in 1939 was not to be understood as including the continental shelf. In appreciating the intention of a party to an instrument there is an essential difference between a grant of rights of exploration and exploitation over a specified area in a concession and the wording of a reservation to a treaty by which a State excludes from compulsory procedures of pacific settlement disputes relating to its territorial status. While there may well be a presumption that a person transferring valuable property rights to another intends only to transfer the rights which he possesses at that time, the case appears to the Court to be quite othenvise when a State, in agreeing to subject itself to compulsory procedures of pacific settlement, excepts from that agreement a category of disputes which, though covering clearly specified subjectmatters, is of a generic kind. Once it is established that the expression "the territorial status of Greece" was used in Greece's instrument of accession as a generic term denoting any matters comprised within the concept of territorial status under general international law, the presumption necessarily arises that its meaning was intended to follow the evolution of the law and to correspond with the meaning attached to the expression by the law in force at any given time. This presumption, in theview of the Court, is even more compelling when it is recalled that the 1928 Act was a convention for the pacific settlement of disputes designed to be of the most general kind and of continuing duration, for it hardly seems conceivable that in such a convention terms like "domestic jurisdiction" and "territorial status" were intended to have a fixed content regardless of the subsequent evolution of international law.