Canada’s third largest party urges Liberal govt to firmly convey HR concerns in IOK to India

ISLAMABAD, Aug 11 (APP):New Democratic Party, the third largest political party of Canada, has asked the Canadian government to firmly communicate its concerns to the Indian government regarding the human rights abuses Indian Occupied Kashmir and revocation of the Article 370 to change the autonomous status of the territory.
In a statement received here, Guy Caron, the Foreign Affairs Critic of Jagmeet Singh-led party, said that the New Democrats were deeply concerned by reports of the Indian government’s crackdown in recent days in Kashmir.
“The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently took steps to revoke section 370 of the Indian constitution, which granted Kashmir considerable autonomy, and moved to arrest top Kashmiri political leaders, deploy thousands of troops, impose a shutdown of telephone and internet services and restrict peaceful assembly,” the statement said.
It said that like Amnesty International and other civil society groups, the New Democratic Party was also troubled by such actions, which provided “fertile ground for more human rights abuses in a region where the people of Kashmir regularly suffer abuses such as excessive force, arbitrary detention and the lack of due process, and communications blackouts.”
The NDP urged the Canadian government to firmly communicate these human rights concerns to Indian authorities.
“We must always have a foreign policy that is based on human rights and international law, not one that pays lip service to a “rules-based international order” without actually standing up for those rules,” the party said.