India has condemned Pakistan for threatening journalists and human rights defenders

Exercising India’s right to reply, the First Secretary of India, S.K. Senthil Kumar condemned Pakistan for trying to divert the council’s attention. “It is better for Pakistan to set up its own house before talking about others,” he said

Highlighting the atrocities committed by the state actors in Pakistan, the Indian Declaration of Occupation of parts of the Indian Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh states that large numbers of Kashmiri prisoners are being held in secret detention facilities in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied territories. Years and they were severely tortured by the security forces. “Enforced disappearances, killings, detentions, custodial deaths and violence by civil rights activists, representatives of local political parties and journalists are commonplace and a standard method of silencing voices against the government and the deep state in Gilgit-Baltistan,” Kumar said.

Highlighting the recent press conference of the OHCHR, which has expressed serious concern about the many incidents that have provoked violence against journalists and human rights defenders in Pakistan, especially against women and minorities, India is particularly concerned with blasphemy allegations – which could put the perpetrators at imminent danger of violence.

HRC’s special policies have recently called on Pakistani authorities to end the secret detention of human rights defender Idris Khattak, whose whereabouts have not been known for more than nine months. Talia, 20, daughter of Idris Khattak, is still waiting for a fair trial for her father.

Defenders of human rights in Pakistan are being silenced on a daily basis through threats, secret detentions, torture and forced disappearances with the direct involvement of the Pakistani government, exposing the falsity of Pakistan’s military-driven ‘democratic’ system. “Targeting journalists through threats, attacks, intimidation and arrests that cause self-censorship,” the First Secretary of India said in a statement.