Conflict

HRW expresses disappointment over India’s response to UN report, urges UNHRC to take action

Srinagar: Human Rights Watch published a report on its website on Tuesday, stating its disappointment towards India’s response and urging the Human Rights council to ‘address rights crisis’ prevalent in Venezuela, Kashmir and Phillipines.

Human Rights Watch is a nonprofit, nongovernmental human rights organization made up of roughly 400 staff members around the globe. Its staff consists of human rights professionals including country experts, lawyers, journalists, and academics of diverse backgrounds and nationalities

While welcoming the 49 page report published by the UN, it said, “Cross-border shelling by Indian and Pakistani troops have killed and injured hundreds. Tens of thousands of indigenous Kashmiri Hindus remain displaced after being forced to flee the valley. Thousands of men have been forcibly disappeared, their wives described as ‘half widows.’ More than 50,000 people have died since the insurgency broke out in 1989. Kashmiris have been tortured or summarily executed by state security forces and threatened or killed by militants. There are serious allegations of sexual violence by all forces.”

It added that any government should focus on addressing the concerns rather than blaming the messenger. While it hailed the Office of the High Commissioner’s efforts, it nudged towards placing “sustained monitoring, investigations and reporting”.

This development arrives after the UN published a 49 page report citing human rights violations by armed forces in Kashmir. India responded by calling the report ‘fallacious, tendentious and motivated’.

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had said the report was “overtly prejudiced” and sought to build a “false narrative”.

New Delhi had also lodged a strong protest on the use of terminology in the report, saying that the body had departed from internationally accepted terminology.

BJP had said in a statement that the UN was biased and that it hadn’t done its ‘homework’.

“In a country where even trees and other natural resources are revered, violation of human rights is unthinkable. The said UN seems to have concluded in a biased way without doing the homework. What they have said is totally ungrounded and BJP rejects it,” said Rajya Sabha MP and BJP national media chief Anil Baluni.

 

Click to comment
To Top