Pakistan wants UNHRC to send fact-finding team to Kashmir
Islamabad: Pakistan yesterday said it has approached the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to send a fact- finding team to Kashmir to investigate the alleged human rights violations and recent killings of innocent people.
“We have requested UNHRC to send a fact-finding mission to Kashmir (in India) and probe recent killings of innocent Kashmiris,” the Prime Minister’s Adviser on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz said.
Briefing journalists at the Foreign Office here, he urged the international community to take notice of the situation in Kashmir and extend its support to the Kashmiri people.
Aziz repeated the words of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif that Kashmir is not India’s internal matter. “Kashmir is not India’s internal matter because it is recognised under the United Nations,” he said and accused India of using “state-sponsored terrorism to justify illegal
occupation over Kashmir”.
To a question as to why Sharif is not using his ‘personal relations’ with his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi to defuse tension in Kashmir, Aziz said, “PM Sharif’s personal ties with PM Modi are not state ties”.
He further said, “It does not matter how many times PM Modi speaks to Sharif on phone in a day what matters is whether the former talks to the latter about the Kashmir issue.”
When asked if Pakistan is considering severing diplomatic tie with India over the Kashmir violence, Aziz said, “Severing ties with India over the issue is no solution to the issue of Kashmir.” The adviser declared that Pakistan “fully backs” All Parties Hurriyet Conference (APHC) leader Syed Ali Geelani’s four-point formula on Kashmir.
Aziz also said that India wants to do point scoring on the issue of filing an application in a local Indian court for registration of case against Prime Minister Sharif.
“Filing an application by an Indian organisation against PM Nawaz Sharif (for declaring Hizbul commander Burhan Wani and observing black day in this connection) in an Indian court is a point-scoring from the Indian government,” he said.
A case has been filed in a court in Ambala, India by the Anti-Terrorist Front against Sharif accusing him of hatching a conspiracy to provoke riots in Jammu and Kashmir.
