As the present writer set out in his paper on The International Court of Justice in 1957 and 1958 under A, the Court, while by its Judgment of November 26, 1957 at once rejecting four of the six preliminary objections submitted by India in defence against the unilateral application of Portugal in the Case concerning Right of Passage over Indian Territory and directed against the jurisdiction of the Court, felt unable to decide upon the two remaining objections without entering into a more thorough examination of the contradictory arguments of the Parties on the subject-matter of the dispute and, for that purpose, joined these two objections to the merits. As is well-known those merits related, in general terms, to the question as to whether India acted correctly when hindering Portugal, Jin 1954, from reasserting her sovereignty over two enclaves from her coastal district of Damão across the intervening Indian territory and to India's general attitude towards the revolutionary activities in the enclaves. When the second phase of this case began, it was consequently still uncertain whether the Court would in the event sustain its jurisdiction and thus in fact be in a position to take cognizance of and decide upon the merits. This situation had also arisen occasionally in the days of the Permanent Court of International Justice.
