Altaf Hamid Rao.
MIRPUR (AJK):(Parliament Times) Leader of Kashmir delegation and Executive Director of the Kashmiri NGO – Kashmir Institute of International Relations (KIIR), Sardar Amjad Yousaf has welcomed the appointment of the new High Commissioner of the United Nations Human Rights Commission and appreciated the statement made by her on the current situation of Jammu and Kashmir.
Sardar Amjad Yousaf was addressing 39th session of UN human Rights council in Geneva in response to the opening statement made by the newly-inducted UN high commissioner for human rights in which she discussed the Kashmir situation on Thursday, says a message reaching and released to the media here on Friday.
“We hope that the Indian government will allow UN fact finding mission to visit Indian held Jammu Kashmir and will put an end to the gross and systematic human rights violations in area under Indian occupation”, Amjad Yousaf said.
The KIIR Executive Director continued as saying “after the first ever report by the UN high commissioner, the response by the Indian government and the official media was very disappointing, rather than cooperating with the OHCHR, the Indians started melodious campaign against the high commissioner and the human rights defenders cooperating with the OHCHR and different mandates and also questioning remote monitoring mechanism”.
The Kashmir delegation leader said “we have been working with the UN mechanism, mandate holders and UN procedures for the last more than two decades”.He further said there are many organizations based in Srinagar who have facilitated the UN monitoring mechanism for the formulation of this comprehensive report.
“The behavior of India which claims to be the largest democracy of the world surprised not only to the High Commissioner and the special procedures but also to the international community at large”, he observed.The KIIR Executive Director said “the life of the human rights defenders based in Srinagar cooperating with the UN system and our colleagues who attend the council sessions are under serious threat due to the malicious Indian propaganda, I will request this council to declare all the human rights defender from Jammu and Kashmir as internationally protected persons otherwise they can be killed like Jalil Andarabi and senior Kashmiri journalist Syed Shujaat Bukhari”, he concluded.
