JUDICIAL INQUIRY INTO BALIBO MASSACRE

Early day motion 498, tabled 29 March 1999 by Lord Foster of Bath (Liberal Democrat). Signed by 70 members.

That this House regrets that the Australian Government has yet to acknowledge that Indonesia's top generals informed it in advance, via its Ambassador, of the Indonesian attack on Balibo, East Timor, which led to the deaths of British newsmen Malcolm Rennie and Brian Peters together with three newsmen from a different Australian television channel, on 16th October 1975; notes that the Australian Government's third major report on these deaths published in February 1999, recognises that Indonesian troops destroyed the newsmen's dead bodies in a deliberate cover-up but ignores other, equally important evidence; and calls upon Her Majesty's Government to institute a full judicial inquiry into the newsmen's deaths and into the relationship between those deaths and the genocide that followed.

Signatures by party: Labour 37, Liberal Democrat 21, Labour/Co-operative 3, Plaid Cymru 3, Conservative 2, DUP 1, Independent 1, Scottish National Party 1, Social Democratic and Labour Party 1.