Foreign Desk Report
NEW YORK: Pakistan has called on the United Nations to closely monitor the situation in the restive Indian Illegally Occupied Kashmir where reprisals and attacks against human rights defenders were growing amid a harsh security clampdown.
“Acts of intimidation and reprisals against those who cooperate with the UN system undermine the credibility and effectiveness of the UN as a whole, including its human rights machinery,” Pakistani delegate Qasim Aziz Butt said during an Interactive Dialogue with the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders, Mary Lawlor.
The dialogue took place in the General Assembly’s Third Committee, which deals with social, cultural and humanitarian issues.
Butt, a second secretary in the Pakistan Mission to the UN, said the gravity and frequency of the reprisals had intensified.
Thousands of Kashmiri youth, human rights defenders, journalists and lawyers were arbitrarily arrested, tortured and put into incommunicado detention.
Civil society organizations and international media had been denied access, as the fourteen-month digital and physical lockdown put the occupied territory into a communication and information blackout.
