Singapore to study new facts over Pulau Batu Puteh ownership

Channel NewsAsia reported late Saturday that Law and Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam said he had seen the documents and that a legal team would study the documents and respond accordingly.

Shanmugam said Malaysia would have to satisfy a number of conditions before the court, according to the report.

"Among them are that there are new facts and that the new facts that have been found would have made ... a decisive difference and the precise legal scope would have to be clarified," he was quoted as saying.

"Looking at it from that perspective, I'm wondering what are the new facts in those documents and how they would have made any difference to the case or will make any difference," he reportedly said.

The new facts which prompted Malaysia to apply for a revision of the ICJ ruling on Pulau Batu Puteh were found in three documents discovered in the National Archives of the United Kingdom.

The ICJ, in a press release on its website on Friday, said the documents included an internal correspondence of the Singapore colonial authorities in 1958, an incident report filed in 1958 by a British naval officer and an annotated map of naval operations from the 1960s.

The documents were discovered in the National Archives between Aug 4, 2016, and Jan 30, 2017, it said.