Kashmiri leaders Mehmood Ahmed Saghar and Altaf Hussain Wani have called on the United Nations and the wider international community to intervene decisively to stop India’s escalating human rights abuses in Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir.
Mehmood Ahmed Saghar, Acting President of the Jammu and Kashmir Democratic Freedom Party in a statement released in Islamabad on Human Rights Day, said India continues to trample the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on this day in 1948, through killings, arbitrary detentions, cordon-and-search operations, and broad suppression of civil liberties across the occupied territory. He said Kashmir remains one of the world’s most distressed regions, where people are denied basic rights and face institutionalised repression by Indian forces.
Saghar urged the UN and international organisations to fulfil their moral and legal obligations by pushing India to halt its brutalities, respect UN resolutions, and allow the Kashmiri people to exercise their inalienable right to self-determination through a UN-supervised referendum.
Echoing these concerns, Altaf Hussain Wani, Chairman of the Kashmir Institute of International Relations, stressed that India’s systematic violation of fundamental political and human rights in IIOJK constitutes a grave breach of the UDHR and multiple international treaties to which it is a signatory. He said India’s failure to uphold its obligations, coupled with its repressive policies, demands global scrutiny and firm accountability measures. Wani said that for over seven decades, Indian forces have committed widespread abuses, including killings, rapes, enforced disappearances, and the crushing of freedoms of expression, assembly, and peaceful protest. He warned that India is aggressively pursuing an Israeli-style model to turn the Muslim-majority region into a minority-controlled territory through demographic engineering.
Calling it imperative for the international community to uphold the sanctity of international law, Wani urged the UN and global human rights bodies to act without delay to stop the atrocities, ensure justice for victims, and hold India accountable for its persistent violations.
Both leaders reaffirmed that coercion and repression can never suppress the Kashmiris’ legitimate struggle for freedom and that the world must step forward to prevent further suffering in the occupied region.
