 And furthermore, as paragraph 3 of article 36 states, their declaration may be made unconditionally or on the condition of reciprocity on the part of several or certain states or for a certain time." And this means that a state could say that it accepts the jurisdiction of the court, provided that such or such other state does likewise, or it could also accept the jurisdiction for, for instance, a period of five years, renewable. The reciprocity which is here at stake is not the same reciprocity as the one which is inherent in the optional close mechanism, and that I just explained and illustrated. Here the unconditional or conditioned character of the optional close relates to the operation of the optional close itself. The state can condition the entry into force of its acceptance to the acceptance by another named state. Among the various conditions and reservations made by states, when they unilaterally accept the jurisdiction of the court, one of them has raised some concern, and it is called the automatic reservation. And let me explain briefly this. Many states that have accepted the competence of the court have excluded disputes relating to matters that, under international law, are exclusively within their domestic jurisdiction. And such reservation is valid, because the court's jurisdiction anyway relates to disputes existing under international law, and the court remains free to apply international law to determine whether the dispute falls exclusively within domestic jurisdiction or not. However, some states have drafted the exclusion of domestic jurisdiction differently, and they said that it was up to them to determine whether an issue related to their domestic jurisdiction or not. And such phrasing has been called the automatic reservation in an optional close, and it has given rise to many debates and controversies as its legality is doubtful. However, in the Norwegian loans case, the court has given effect to such a reservation in 1957. In that case, the court found it had no jurisdiction to adjudicate upon the dispute brought by France against Norway concerning the payment of various Norwegian loans issued in France. The court said that Norway was entitled to avail itself as a way of reciprocity of the automatic reservation contained in the French optional close. Thus the court gave effect to the French automatic reservation. The judgment of the court gave rise to a very famous separate opinion by Judge Ersch Lothopac, who criticized the validity of the automatic reservation and considered that because the automatic reservation cannot be severed from the French optional close and was an essential element of it, the French optional close as a whole was contrary to the statute and invalid. Let me end this video by turning to the issue of the interpretation of optional closes. Because optional closes are unilateral acts of state sovereignty, the rules on treaty interpretation only apply analogously, that is to the extent that they are compatible with the sui generis character of those acts. And in the Spain vs Canada case that I mentioned earlier, the court said that the declaration has to be interpreted as a whole, as it stands, having due regard to the word used and to the intention of the state concern at the time when it accepted the compulsory jurisdiction of the court. The court added, I quote again, the intention of a reserving state maybe deduced not only from the text of the relevant close, but also from the context in which the close is to be read and an examination of evidence regarding the circumstances of its preparation and the purposes intended to be served, end of quote. More recently, in a case between Australia and Japan about whaling in Antarctic, the court applied again those principles to interpret Australia's optional close.