Geneva: India on Monday asked the United Nations Human Rights Council to hold Pakistan accountable for the “grave state-sponsored” human rights violation of its people.
Exercising its right to reply during the 46th session of the Human Rights Council, New Delhi said that it is high time that the failed state of Pakistan stops preaching and focuses on its responsibility towards the millions suffering in Pakistan.
Delivering India’s response, Pawankumar Badhe, first secretary, Permanent Mission of India in Geneva, stressed that political and human rights activists continue to be targeted and charged under draconian laws in Pakistan, including under the anti-terrorism act.
Badhe said that according to victim groups, tens of thousands of persons have disappeared from Balochistan since the year 2000.
“Families of persons who have disappeared continue to struggle for their voices to be heard. Hundreds of supporters of these families held a 10-day sit in protest in Islamabad last month,” he said, adding, “Balochistan has now come to be known as the land of the disappeared”.
India also said that the risk of enforced disappearances has heightened in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan after the promulgation of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Actions Ordinance. The ordinance gives security agencies vast abusive powers, including the power to detain people without trial or charge on vaguely defined grounds.
Citing the case of ‘Arzoo Raza’ a 12-year-old girl who was abducted, chained in a cattle pen and forced to marry her abductor, India asserted that there has been systematic discrimination and persecution faced by Christian, Hindus and other minorities in Pakistan.
The issue of killing of 11 coal miners of the minority Shia Hazara community in January in Pakistan was also raised by the first secretary.
“In September 2020, over 30,000 people gathered in Karachi, demanding that Shia Muslims be declared heretics and ‘blasphemers’ and, calling for their beheading. The killing of 11 coal miners of the Shia Hazara community, in January this year, is the latest in the series of acts of violence against Shia community to which they have been subjected in Pakistan,” Badhe said.