The long and complicated dispute between Britain and Iran over the latter country’s nationalization of its oil resources, which so deeply troubled the world not many months ago, is now being laid before the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

Actually the hearing which was begun this week is of a preliminary sort and will bring only a decision on the question of the court’s jurisdiction. It is, of course, the Iranian argument that nationalization was a purely domestic matter and an assertion of national freedom and hence cannot be judged by the rules of international law. The British contention is that Iran’s action constituted a violation of an international compact of 1933.

The Iranian Premier, Mohammed Mossadegh, made the first statement and pitched it on the political more than the legal level. The real case for Iran has been put by a Belgian attorney. [Henri Rollin] The British are represented by the legal adviser to the Foreign Office, by the Attorney General and by the Chichele professor of international law at Oxford.

The crux of the matter, so far as the court goes, will presumably be the interpretation of a particular expression in a 1932 declaration of the Iranian Parliament. Construed in one way, as the Iranian advocate argues, this would limit the British case to a single document—the 1933 agreement which Iran says is not an international treaty at all in the accepted sense. Construed in another way, as the British argue, this same phrase in the 1932 declaration would permit Britain to cite ten treaties which would provide a legal basis for the contention that an international agreement has been violated.

Obviously, the matters involved are abstruse points of law on which no layman, especially at this distance, can have any valid opinion. But it is clear that the future of the dispute between London and Tehran will be of one kind if the court rules that it cannot consider the matter, and of another and very different kind if it holds it does have jurisdiction. A five-man mission from the International Bank will leave Iran tomorrow having failed to obtain endorsement of its plan to take over management of Iranian oil facilities on an interim basis.