Foreign Desk Report
NEW YORK: The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Contact Group on Jammu and Kashmir, which met in New York on Sunday, voiced “deep concern” over the continued human rights violations by India in occupied Kashmir, and called on UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the Security Council and the Human Rights Council to take steps to end those abuses.
The meeting, which was requested by Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, was held on the eve of the UN General Assembly’s high-level debate opening on Tuesday.
Attending the meeting were permanent representatives of Saudi Arabia, Niger, Azerbaijan and Pakistan. The OIC Secretary General was represented by the Permanent Representative of the OIC Observer Mission to the UN, Ambassador Agshin Mehdiyev. The OIC group discussed the worsening human rights situation in Illegally Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIoJK), according to a press release issued by Pakistani Mission to the UN.
Reaffirming its stand on the Kashmir dispute, the Contact Group also urged the UN chief to press India to rescind the unilateral and illegal measures taken on and after 5 August 2019 and to implement the Security Council resolutions calling for a plebiscite to enable the Kashmiri people to exercise their right to self-determination.Conveying a special message of the Foreign Minister Qureshi to the meeting, Ambassador Munir Akram stated that the RSS-BJP regime in India was implementing what its rulers had themselves called a “Final Solution”.
The regime was engaged in systematically engineering a demographic change in IIoJK through new domicile rules, he said. The issuance of 1.6 mln domicile certificates (since March) was meant to change the demography of IIoJK from a Muslim majority into Hindu majority territory.
