Panel Spotlights Human Rights Abuses in Kashmir, Palestine
By Elaine Pasquini
Washington, DC: Kashmir and Palestine have been major concerns of the United Nations prior to the organization declaring December 10 as Human Rights Day in 1948. “Seventy-three human rights days later the people of both Kashmir and Palestine continue to suffer gross human rights violations without redress,” stated Imraan Mir from the Kashmir Law and Justice Project, moderator of a December 10 online discussion sponsored by Al-Haq, Kashmir Law and Justice Project, Kashmir Scholars Consultative and Action Network, Stand With Kashmir and Just Peace Advocates.
On November 22, Mir noted, Indian authorities arrested the internationally acclaimed Kashmiri human rights defender Khurram Parvez, who has worked on human rights issues for over two decades. Parvez is currently detained in a maximum-security prison for allegedly violating India’s counterterrorism laws.
“In Kashmir, where dissent can be a death sentence, every conceivable kind of expression, journalism, social media, religious observance, burying one’s dead, making art, cheering for a sports team, even seeking redress for a violation have been punished under counterterror and state security laws,” Mir said. “Indian forces have legalized impunity, which means that when people in Kashmir are killed, raped, tortured, disappeared or illegally imprisoned there is no remedy available.”
Mir also brought up the case of Jalil Andrabi, an internationally recognized Kashmiri human rights lawyer who was executed by Indian forces 25 years ago. “There was never justice or accountability for Jalil,” Mir lamented. “There has never been justice or accountability for any of the other hundreds of thousands of victims in Kashmir.”
Iver Ørstavik, senior advisor for the Rafto Foundation for Human Rights, called Parvez “an important member of the next generation of human rights defenders in Kashmir…and a model human rights defender.”
The main reason Parvez is now in jail is due to his “very impressive body of work” which documents longtime human rights violations in Kashmir, Ørstavik said. “This work has produced and communicated evidence of the severe human cost of the conflict, which has been going on for 70 years in Kashmir.”
Parvez documented the following human rights violations throughout Indian-administered Kashmir in 2019.
A. 326 cases of detainees severely beaten.
B. 238 cases of sexual torture, including rape.
C. 231 cases of electrocution.
D. 190 cases in which detainees were stripped naked.
E. 169 cases of roller treatment of detainees’ legs.
F. 121 cases of hanging detainees from the ceiling.
G. 101 cases of heads being forced under water.
H. 35 cases of burning.
In addition, he reported that 301 out of 432 victims in the report were considered to be civilians, including women, students, juveniles, human rights activists and journalists. Twenty-seven were minors.
Since no charges or evidence have been presented to justify his detainment, Ørstavik asserted, “Khurram Parvez is therefore arbitrarily detained and must therefore be released.”
Carolyn Nash, Asia advocacy director for Amnesty International USA, spoke about how repressive regimes function and create laws to justify their actions.
“What we see when we see these repressive crackdowns and increasing use of authoritarianism is not about the specific case or incident, it’s about creating an environment in which everyone is unsafe by design,” she explained. “Mechanisms of repression are often adaptable so that people in power can use them to go after whoever they feel needs to be silenced at particular moments, and are designed to give an appearance of legitimacy.”
Repressive steps India has taken include revocation in 2019 of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which granted temporary special status or autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir, and the Citizenship Amendment Act, which stripped many Muslims of their citizenship rights.
Despite being “targetive laws,” underpinning them was a more “flexible institution of repression which was the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, a legal institution that the government has been successful in using to go after whoever it needs to in order to move through some of these more repressive tactics in the background,” Nash explained. This act allows for people to be held up to 180 days without being charged.
Jonathan Kuttab, international human rights attorney and co-founder of the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq, one of the organizations recently designated a terrorist organization by the Israeli government, noted Human Rights Day was important because “many people think international law means nothing or it is irrelevant or impotent.” But, he pointed out, “It is what all countries at least verbally commit to and which all countries must be forced to abide by.”
Kuttab went on to explain how governments try to control the narrative by using the power of definition. “Those who are in power grant themselves the right to define who is a terrorist and who isn’t,” he said. “The purported definition has nothing to do with the reality on the ground.”
Pointing to India and Israel as countries that have created laws which restrict human rights and have courts which do not always act independently, Kuttab decried the creation of laws and use of courts “not in defense of the weak and oppressed, but in defense of the regime, in defense of the oppressors.”
Lastly, the attorney warned about governments’ use of secret evidence and administrative measures which allow laws of oppressive regimes to become the controlling principles behind their activity. “The term “secret evidence should shoot up red flags…that somebody is trying…to get away with illegality, sometimes even get away with murder under the guise and cloak of legality.”
Publicly calling out courts and administrations that violate international law is a responsibility of human rights organizations, he said. “Human rights organizations don’t have guns, tanks, airplanes. They have truth on their side.”
When governments don’t abide by international law and do not help enforce international law or violators of it, then “civil society has to step up in a non-violent but public manner to try and bring pressure on those who violate human rights,” Kuttab said.
(Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journalist. Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)
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