ECtHR: Case brought by families of men killed by British soldiers in 1948 Malayan Emergency ‘inadmissible’

The case concerned the killing of 24 men in December 1948 by British soldiers in the village of Batang Kali in Selangor, which is now a state of Malaysia but at the time was part of the British Empire.

The killings occurred shortly after the end of the Second World War during a communist insurgency which became known as the “Malayan Emergency”.

The official account of the killings was that a patrol of the Scots Guards, sent to the village to ambush insurgents, had detained men they believed to be “bandits” and opened fire on them when they had tried to escape.

The surviving villagers alleged on the other hand that the villagers, who were unarmed, had been rounded up, and the men had been separated from the women and children and murdered in cold blood.

The British authorities took some investigatory steps in 1948 and 1970 and the Royal Malaysian Police in 1993, but no full public inquiry has ever been carried out.

The 1970 investigation was prompted by a number of guardsmen making sworn statements to the media that the villagers had not tried to escape and that they had been ordered to massacre them.

The guardsmen confirmed their statements when interviewed by the prosecuting authorities. The Attorney General decided however that the investigation should go no further because it was unlikely that sufficient evidence would be obtained to support a prosecution.

The applicants complained before the European Court that there had never been a full and independent public inquiry into the killings.

The court found that the applicants’ complaint was not within its jurisdiction (ratione temporis) because the deaths had occurred more than ten years before the United Kingdom had given individual applicants the right to apply directly to the court.

In any case, new evidence had come to light as early as 1970, when the soldiers had admitted that they had been ordered to carry out the massacre, so the applicants had lodged their application long after the Convention time-limit.