New Delhi: India said on Wednesday that it is past time for the UN to hold Pakistan accountable for the institutionalised discrimination and systematic persecution of its religious and racial minorities.
In exercising its right to respond, India emphasised that the majority of terrorists who are outlawed internationally had been operating freely on Pakistani territory.
“Considering its own top leadership has in the past openly acknowledged creating terrorist groups and training them to fight in Afghanistan and the Indian Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan’s audacity, as a self-styled torchbearer for human rights of the people of India, is appalling,” Pawankumar Badhe, First Secretary, Permanent Mission of India said in a statement.
“We urge the council and its mechanisms to call upon Pakistan to take credible steps to end its state-sponsored terrorism and dismantle terrorist infrastructure in the territories under its control,” he added.
India further said that “discriminatory laws, coupled with deliberate apathy of law enforcement agencies, have ensured a climate of religious bigotry in which victimisation of minorities continues unabated”.
“It is high time that the council and its mechanisms held Pakistan to account for the systemic persecution of and institutional discrimination perpetrated against its religious and ethnic minorities,” it said.
“Extrajudicial abductions, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention and tortures have been used by Pakistan as tools of state policy to target human rights defenders, political activists, students, and journalists and to crush dissent. Pakistan is thus well-advised to put its own house in order before pointing fingers at others,” India said, rejecting the references to India in a statement by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries.
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