Mockery of Human Rights

While pulling out from the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), the US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, used the harshest possible words, calling the council a “hypocritical and self-serving organisation”. The Recent report made public on July 8, 2019 by the UNHRC actually proved that point. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published a special report titled, ‘Update of the Situation of Human Rights in Indian-Administered Kashmir and Pakistan-Administered Kashmir from May 2018 to April 2019’. Though Bharat at diplomatic level has rejected this report calling it ‘fallacious, tendentious and [politically] motivated’ and rightly so, the real diagnosis of the report shows a deeper malaise that the entire issue of ‘human rights’ discourse is facing globally.

This forty-three page report by the UNHRC is a bunch of contradiction mocking human rights on every count. Already the UN body has been under criticism for being governed by the members with a poor human rights records. In 2006, when the earlier version called United Nations Commission for Human Rights was reformed to address this issue the Council that is supposed to function as the world’s top human rights watch dog in its current 47 elected member states that include Egypt, Venezuela, Bahrain, Cameroon and the Philippines, the countries well known for their abysmal track-record on the human rights front. What can be expected from the report prepared by these countries?

If we take just a few examples, the motivation of the report can be exposed. The report quotes, “According to Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 35 civilians were killed and 135 injured in 2018 [on Pakistan’s side of the Line of Control].” The report does not bother to mention even the numbers from Bharatiya side. A section in the report titled, ‘Impact of counter-terrorism on Human Rights’, again the corresponding section on Bharat is missing in the report. The recommendations given to the authorities in Bharat are as many as nineteen and most of them are related to the democratic rights of the people in ‘Kashmir’. The OHCHR recommends only ten points for the authorities in Pakistan and guess what, none of them talks about either dismantling the terror infrastructure or human rights violations that takes place because of Pakistan’s terror promotion policy. What can be bigger hypocrisy than this?

Thankfully, the official statement by the Ministry of External Affairs thrashed the Report in the harshest possible words, with a warning, ‘The legitimisation of terrorism has been further compounded by an unacceptable advocacy of the dismemberment of a UN member State’. The response also reiterated the rightful legal position of Bharat claiming, ‘the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India’ and naming Pakistan for ‘illegal and forcible occupation of a part of the Indian state’. This diplomatic posturing is important but not sufficient is the message of this report. Entire narrativising of ‘Kashmir’, which should have been about ‘Pakistan-occupied Jammu-Kashmir’, has been done by Pakistan not just through official diplomatic channels but through systematic lobbying on international forums since 1949. What is being articulated by Home Minister Amit Shah first time in the Parliament while discussing the need for extension of President’s rule in J&K, should have been the international discourse. Many Bharatiya think tanks are working on the same; they should be allowed and encouraged to use spaces on the sidelines of the official deliberations that takes place in the UN. Unless we explore this possibility of internationalising Bharatiya narrative, which is just, truthful and legal, with all possible force and resources, the arsenal of ‘human rights’ will be used to target Bharat by perpetrators of terror.