India's unilateral move can't alter IWT: Pak envoy

Ambassador of Pakistan to the United States Rizwan Saeed Sheikh said that India's unilateral announcement of April 2025 cannot alter the Indus Waters Treaty's (IWT) legal status or extinguish the rights and obligations arising under it, asserting the Treaty remains valid, operative and binding.

"For more than six decades, the IWT has provided a rules-based framework for managing one of the world's most important transboundary river systems. Its resilience has rested not on political goodwill, but on the fact that it replaced unilateral discretion with binding rules and procedures for resolving disputes, the ambassador wrote in an article 'India Must Respect Indus Waters Treaty,' published in the Newsweek.

He said undermining a time-tested water treaty, with a malicious aim of weaponizing transboundary rivers, would not only reduce certainty and predictability, but also pose a serious threat to peace and stability in an already volatile region.

Responding to an article entitled "A Treaty Pakistan Destroyed Long Before India Set It Aside", written by India's Ambassador to the United States Vinay Kwatra, Amb. Sheikh said India had been advancing this narrative with increasing frequency since its unlawful pronouncement in April 2025 to hold the Treaty "in abeyance."

"It appears intended to retrospectively justify a unilateral action that finds no basis either in the Treaty itself or in international law," he emphasised.

The ambassador said the IWT is a binding international agreement concluded on September 19, 1960.