The deteriorating situation in India-held Kashmir has now made it crucial to establish an independent, impartial and international mission to assess the situation, the UN human rights chief has said, while regretting India's lack of response to his request for access to its controlled part of the disputed state.
UN rights chief Zeid Raad al-Hussein told the Geneva-based Human Rights Council that he received a letter from the Government of Pakistan on Sept 9 formally inviting a team from his office to visit Azad Kashmir but only in tandem with a mission to the Indian side.“I believe an independent, impartial and international mission is now needed crucially,” the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein has said in connection with unrest in Indian-held Kashmir.
The UN rights chief made the remarks in his opening statement at the 33rd session of the Human Rights Council on Tuesday. “And that it should be given free and complete access to establish an objective assessment of the claims made by the two sides.”
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein. PHOTO: OHCHR
Hussein said he had received a letter from the Government of Pakistan on September 9 formally inviting an Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) team to the Pakistani side of the line of control, “but in tandem with a mission to the Indian side”. “I have yet to receive a formal letter from the Government of India,” he added.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs rejected Hussein’s statement that the OHCHR was receiving reports of Indian authorities using excessive force against the civilian population in Indian-occupied Kashmir. “We note that he has received conflicting narratives on the cause for the confrontations”.
The Indian response went on to differentiate the situation on either side of the Line of Control by claiming that Indian-occupied Kashmir had a democratically-elected government, while Azad Jammu and Kahsmir only had an “arbitrarily appointed” diplomat as its head.
“The Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir is part of a pluralistic and secular democracy, where freedoms are guaranteed by an independent judiciary, an active media and a vibrant civil society,” the statement claimed, adding that AJK was administered by a “deep state” and had become “a hub for the global export of terror”.Quoting the Vienna Declaration which states that “the promotion and protection of all human rights is a legitimate concern of the international community”, he argued that human rights is not exclusively a national issue.
Apart from India and Pakistan, the high commissioner referred to Syria, Venezuela, Turkey, Ethiopia, Gambia, Burundi, China, Nepal, the US (for refusing access to Guantanamo Bay), Israel, Iran, North Korea, among other countries for non-cooperation with UN human rights mechanisms.
“Human rights violations will not disappear if a government blocks access to international observers and then invests in a public relations campaign to offset any unwanted publicity. On the contrary, efforts to duck or refuse legitimate scrutiny raise an obvious question: what, precisely, are you hiding from us?” he said.
