Foreign Desk Report
GENEVA: Delegates of Pakistan and India Wednesday clashed over the Kashmir dispute after Pakistani Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari highlighted the lingering issue as well as the plight of Indian Muslims at the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council, while urging an independent probe into the rights abuses in the occupied state.
Exercising India’s right of reply, Seema Pujani, a second secretary at the Indian Mission to the United Nations, accused Ms. Mazari of misusing the UN platforms for what she described as “baseless and malicious propaganda against India” and went on to link Pakistan with terrorism.
Speaking in his right of reply, Pakistani delegate Junaid Suleman called the Indian allegations a “desperate attempt to deflect attention from India’s extensively recorded human rights crimes in occupied Jammu & Kashmir and against its own minorities.”
“Obviously,” Suleman, a second secretary at the Pakistani Mission to the UN said, “this canard is neither new nor authentic.”
