India out to mute rights defenders, UN told

Pakistan has called on the United Nations to closely monitor the situation in the restive Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK), where reprisals and attacks against human rights defenders were growing amid a harsh security clampdown.

During an Interactive Dialogue with the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders in the in the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee, Pakistani delegate Qasim Aziz Butt said that the gravity and frequency of the Indian reprisal attacks had intensified.

“Acts of intimidation and reprisals against those who cooperate with the UN system undermine the credibility and effectiveness of the UN as a whole, including its human rights machinery,” Butt told the committee, which deals with social, cultural and humanitarian issues.

“Thousands of Kashmiri youth, human rights defenders, journalists and lawyers were arbitrarily arrested, tortured and put into incommunicado detention,” Butt, a second secretary in the Pakistan mission to the UN, said.

“Civil society organisations and international media have been denied access, as the 14-month digital and physical lockdown put the occupied territory into a communication and information blackout.”

Butt referred to last month’s cold-blooded murder of lawyer Babar Qadri, a renowned Kashmiri human rights defender, by unidentified men in IIOJK. He said Qadri joined a long list of critical voices who had been systematically eliminated through extrajudicial killings.

He informed the committee that major human rights organisations, including the Human Rights Watch and the Amnesty International, had continuously been expressing concerns over these systematic reprisals against human rights defenders in India and occupied Kashmir.

“Instead of responding to these concerns, the Indian government has embarked upon a witch-hunt against those who dare to report these crimes,” he said. “Only last month the Amnesty International ceased work in India, citing constant harassment at the hands of the government authorities.”

Butt warned that the ongoing curtailment of rights in IIOJK, including the right to free speech and expression and the right to peaceful assembly and association had a direct bearing on the safety of human rights defenders, and their ability to carry out their work effectively.

False narrative

Meanwhile, speaking in the UNGA’s Fourth Committee, which deals with political and decolonisation issues, Pakistani delegate Bilal Mahmood Chaudhary rejected India’s false narrative to equate the Kashmiris’ struggle for the right of self-determination with terrorism.

“The indigenous resistance in occupied Kashmir stemmed from the denial of that inalienable right to the oppressed people,” Chaudhary said. “Since the Indian colonisation of Jammu and Kashmir in 1947, New Delhi has tried different tactics to sustain its illegal occupation.”

Chaudhary Exercised his right of reply following the statement of an Indian representative who claimed that Jammu and Kashmir was an integral part of India and that the principle of self-determination was no justification for undermining a member state’s territorial integrity.

Chaudhary, a counsellor at the Pakistan Mission to the UN, pointed out that there was a “massive resistance” to India’s rule in IIOJK. “The Kashmiri people remain resolute … despite being subjected to massacre, rape, torture, mass blinding and forced disappearances.”

Referring to India’s attempt to alter the demographics in the colonised territory, he said that India now aimed to snatch the cultural identity and land of the indigenous people of Jammu and Kashmir But she needed to understand that such deceptions were destined to fail.

“Fearful of strong local reaction, India continues to impose inhumane military and digital siege, shutting out IIOJK from rest of the world. [But] these [atrocities] will intensify the yearnings of the people of Jammu and Kashmir for the right to self-determination.”

Chaudhary reminded the committee that the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples gives them the right to self-determination, adding that the subjecting peoples to alien subjugation was contrary to the UN Charter.