Islamabad: Pakistan on Friday reiterated its call for enhanced international monitoring and continued United Nations reporting on the alleged human rights crisis in Jammu and Kashmir.
The Pak Foreign Office was quoted as saying in a statement that, the call for international monitoring was to “save lives, dignity and freedoms of the Kashmiri people under illegal occupation for over seven decades”.
The call comes a day after the UN Special Rapporteurs expressed concerns over the human rights situation in Kashmir, in its third communication to India since it imposed a lockdown in the region in August last year.
“Pakistan wishes to underscore the importance of growing international concern over the grave and systematic human rights abuses being perpetrated by Indian security forces against Kashmiris in Kashmir.”
“The 2018 and 2019 UN Kashmir reports provided a window to the world about the scale of India’s human rights violations, aided and abetted by hundreds of thousands of forces and draconian laws,” the Pak FO was quoted as saying in statement by Pakistani media.
The Pak Foreign Office highlighted that after the annexation of the territory “India’s human rights abuses have reached new heights of brutality, impunity, and shame”.
“This is marked by more than 11 months of unabated military siege in [ Kashmir], communications blockade, extra-judicial killings in fake encounters, and so-called cordon-and-search operations, collective punishment of entire communities and neighbourhoods, and crimes against humanity,” the Pak FO’s statement alleged.
The Pak Foreign Office noted that India’s international scrutiny and censure continues to grow and its dismal disregard of human dignity, fundamental rights and freedoms is being meticulously documented by human rights and civil society organisations, international media and parliamentarians.
“The UN human rights machinery has consistently spotlighted India’s non-compliance with its international human rights obligations. Through several official communications, nearly a dozen UN Special Rapporteurs have regularly raised serious concerns over India’s consistent pattern of arbitrary arrests, detentions, torture, corporal punishment, extra-judicial killings, and physical and digital lockdown in occupied Jammu and Kashmir,” the statement read.
The statement noted that despite several global indictments, India continued to persist in a mode of defiance and denial.
