Sardar Masood Khan, President Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), while talking to twenty five members of the Foreign Relations Committee of the European Parliament on Tuesday called for a sharper focus on the Kashmir dispute for a just and lasting solution. President Masood Khan urged the European Parliament, which he said was the first international sovereign Parliament, to call for an end to the horrendous human rights violations in the Indian Occupied Kashmir.
"Instead of showing cautious neutrality, the European Parliament and other world parliaments should speak up for the rights of the Kashmiri people," he said. The President appealed to the European Parliament to side with the oppressed, and not the oppressor, by calling for an end to massive and gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity being committed in the IOK by the occupation forces.
He said this could be done through passing a resolution on the situation in Kashmir, holding debates on the floor, and facilitating a peace process. The European countries, President Masood Khan said, has led the international community in evolving and universalising human rights standards, conventions and treaties. "The international human rights law toady is being violated with impunity in Kashmir", he said adding the European Parliament should play its role to prevent this outrage.
The European Parliament, he said, should urge the United Nations to use its good offices to stop the ongoing human rights crisis and carnage in Kashmir. "Most importantly, the UN Security Council should be asked to implement its own resolutions on Kashmir," he emphasised. The Kashmiris, he said, want a democratic exercise though which they can realise their right to self-determination.
"Kashmiris abhor violence in all forms; they are a peaceful people who want freedom. The people of Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan are striving for a peaceful, negotiated resolution of the dispute", the AJK President. He appealed to the international community to shed "apathy" and come to the rescue of the Kashmiris, who were suffering grievously. "There should be a shift from the so-called impartiality to a quest for justice in Kashmir," he said, adding that bigger countries should not be given a license to trample the rights of a people and get away with their crimes.
He told his interlocutors that Kashmiris are determined to get their rights and will continue their struggle until they get freedom.
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