ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has once again laid before the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) the ever worsening human rights record of India, putting the spotlight on the deteriorating human rights situation in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK).
With its worsening human rights situation, India had become an extremist country where minorities live in constant fear.
During the ongoing 46th session of the UN Human Rights Council, Pakistan took India to task for its massive human rights abuses and for the disinformation campaign directed against Pakistan.
It drew the world’s attention to the New Delhi’s unwillingness to stop its widely reported blatant rights abuses in Occupied Kashmir, severely condemned by the international community.
The Council is meeting in Geneva from 22 February to 19 March at the United Nations Office, an event where Pakistan showed the world the real face of India stifling the voice of Kashmiris.
India has also unleashed a reign of terror against Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Dalits – the low caste Hindus, and the list goes on.
“India has failed and will continue to fail in hiding its brutal repression of Kashmiri people behind the self-serving smokescreen of terrorism,” Junaid Suleman, a Pakistani diplomat, told the Geneva-based Council in the exercise of his right of reply after an Indian representative made oft-repeated allegations about Pakistan’s involvement in terrorism.
“As Pakistan highlights India’s atrocities in Occupied Jammu & Kashmir, which have been well-documented by the Office of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN Mandate Holders (rights experts) and international NGOs, the Council has yet to hear any response from India- a country that claims to be world’s largest democracy but has shamelessly violated every human rights principle, norms and laws,” said Suleman, a second secretary at the Pakistan Mission in Geneva.
The Indian representative, Pawankumar Badhe, had reacted to Pakistan Ambassador Khalil Hashmi’s speech in which the Pakistani envoy had urged the UN rights chief to conduct an impartial investigation into India’s multiple violations of human rights in the disputed territory.
Pakistani diplomat Suleman said, New Delhi’s “compulsive obsession with Pakistan is neither new nor surprising”, and pointed out that the Indian government had deployed tools of deflection, deception and disinformation as evident from the EU DisInfo Lab’s two investigative reports and the “infamous Goswami saga”.
He also mentioned the shuttering of Amnesty International’s office last year and vicious attacks on the UN Human Rights machinery.
Suleman said, “India’s façade of a practicing democracy stands exposed today … its representative can no longer mask the facts that only in India dissent is sedition, India is a country where human rights activists are branded as terrorists and where peaceful protests are treated as part of an imaginary global conspiracy against a failing State. The farmers in India were out in the streets and had placed New Delhi under siege for the past three months”.