‘IOJ&K rights’ abuses need enhanced UN monitoring

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan once again on Friday reiterated its call for enhanced international monitoring of and continued UN reporting on the human rights crisis in the Indian Occupied Jammu & Kashmir (IOJ&K) to save lives, dignity and freedom of Kashmiris under the illegal occupation for over seven decades.

“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 the human rights and civil society organizations, international media and parliamentarians,” says a reminder from the Foreign Office.

Pakistan says India’s willful defiance of international law, democratic norms and its human rights obligations necessitates continued accountability and opprobrium, as underlined in the UN Kashmir Reports.

“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 IOJ&K,” said the Foreign Office in a statement.

Pointing to the continuing global indictments, Pakistan says India continues to persist in a mode of defiance and denial. “It rejected the two Kashmir reports and refuses to grant access to any independent international observer, organization and the media to investigate the gross human rights violations,” added the Foreign Office.

In fact, India has heightened its repression in IOJ&K taking advantage of the world’s preoccupation with the COVID-19 pandemic. India is undertaking further reprehensible and unlawful steps to engineer demographic change in IOJ&K and convert the Kashmiri Muslim majority into a minority.

“The 2018 and 2019 UN Kashmir reports provided a window to the world on the scale of India’s human rights violations, aided and abetted by hundreds of thousands of occupation forces and draconian laws”, points out the statement.

Ever since its unlawful and unilateral actions in the occupied territory on 5 August 2019, the magnitude of India’s human rights abuses has reached new heights of brutality, impunity and shame. This is marked by more than 11 months of unabated military siege in IOJ&K, 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 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 & Kashmir.”