Human rights

The claimants’ contention that there should be a public inquiry or similar investigation into events that occurred in December 1948 when a patrol of the Second Battalion of the Scots Guard shot and killed 24 civilians at a rubber plantation in the State of Selangor, which was a British protected state within the former Federation of Malaya, was dismissed. The Court of Appeal held, among other things that, it had not been the intention of Parliament to leave open in domestic law a mandatory duty without temporal limit by reference to customary international law. Further, customary international law in 1948 did not embrace a positive obligation to investigate the events. There might have been straws in the wind, but international law had not imposed an obligation of the kind contended for in 1948.