The United Nations has shown concern about the worrisome condition of people in the state of Jammu and Kashmir by releasing its second report on the state within the short span of thirteen months.
.@UNHumanRights report on the situation in #Kashmir May 2018- April 2019 shows the number of civilian casualties over this period may be the highest in over a decade.
Neither #India nor #Pakistan have taken concrete steps to address numerous UN concerns. https://t.co/oacEAUjcO4 pic.twitter.com/yPZ6WNColN
— UN Geneva (@UNGeneva) July 8, 2019
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has argued through the report that it stands by the accusations it had earlier made regarding the rising graph of human rights violation ns and the killing of ordinary civilians by the state authorities over the past couple of years.
In the report, the United Nations has accused the Indian state of gross violation of human rights and said that in the state of Jammu and Kashmir there must be formed a body that would conduct an independent enquiry into these violations.
The report in question is 43 pages long and has been released by the OHCHR on Monday. The report has also called out to Pakistan for having perpetually detained Kashmiri separatists in the PoK region of the disputed land.
The land of Jammu and Kashmir has been a land of perpetual turmoil between the nations of India and Pakistan and the two nations have already fought two massive wars over this Himalayan territory.
The situation between the two countries aggravated to a war like condition earlier this year when a convoy carrying 4o Indian soldiers was killed in a suicide attack in an action that was taken responsibility for by a Pakistan based terrorist organisation.
The United Nations has asked the Indian state to set up an independent commission to look into the matter and enquire why such gross violations of human rights continues to take place despite widespread awareness about the issue.
The report tells us that the heightened tensions in Kashmir in the aftermath of the February suicide bombing has led to the existence of a perpetual conflict in the state and has had a major effect on the condition of human rights of the civilians and even impacted their right to life.
The report says ” Authorities in India- administered Kashmir continue to use various forms of arbitrary detention to target protestors, political dissidents and other civil society actors”.
The report also calls for repealing the controversial AFSPA regulation of the state and says that the Indian troops in Kashmir should not have special powers as this leads to its arbitrary use and the gross violation of human rights. The report also raised alarm at the fact that there has not been a single prosecution of armed forces personnel granted by the Central government in a civilian court.
The report said that although it is widely known that a large amount of civilian lives are lost every day in gunfire, there is so body that keeps an account of the lives lost in such a process and why such causalities continue to take place.
They argue that the Indian Security Forces have never been asked to rethink their strategies for controlling the crowd and nobody has beeb prosecuted till date.
The report by the United Nations has recommended the formation of a commission that will conduct independent inquiry into the allegations of human rights violations in Kashmir. The commission of inquiry by the United Nations is a body that it reserves for conducting inquiry into matters of major global crisis.
It was in 2018 that the United Nation had released its first report on the Kashmir crisis and called for an international investigation into the abuse of human rights in Kashmir.
The Indian government has responded to the United Nations Report by calling it false and accused it of depicting a narrative which was false. In a statement Indian government’s spokesperson Raveesh Kumar accused the OHCHR of “legitimising terrorism”. He also said that the problem with the report was that kit did not respect India’s sovreignity and supported the core issue of cross-border terrorism.
Those who opposed India’s reaction to the United Nations Report said that it only represented India’s negligence of human rights and was nothing but immature. They also argued that if India was so confident that all such reports were false and were politically motivated then why was India not prepared to allow an independent inquiry into the gross violation of human rights by the India forces.
The United Nations Report was also critical of the role played by Pakistan and said that it was possible for large scale detention of separatists in the Pakistan admistered region of Kashmir. The report argued that the people living in the Pok region and the Gilgit- Baltistan areas where deprived of all kinds of human rights and had no access to freedom of expression or opinion.
The report holds both India and Pakistan responsible for not taking up any concrete steps according to the numerous concerns that the United Nations asserted in its June report on Kashmir.
