News
September 04, 2026
Pakistan Wins Indus Waters Battle at The Hague
By Abid Hussain
Islamabad: A court of arbitration in The Hague has ruled that India cannot unilaterally suspend the Indus Waters Treaty , rejecting every argument New Delhi has used to justify holding the six-decade-old water-sharing agreement “in abeyance” since April 2025.
In a unanimous decision issued on Monday, the five-member court found that the treaty “remains fully in force” and that India “must observe its obligations” under it, including those governing the design and operation of hydropower projects on rivers that flow into Pakistan.
The ruling is the first time an international court has ruled on whether India’s decision to place the treaty in abeyance is legally valid.
India announced the decision in April 2025, after a deadly attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir, saying it would suspend the treaty until Pakistan “credibly and irrevocably” ends support for cross-border terrorism. Islamabad denies accusations that it was behind the attack, in which 26 civilians were killed by gunmen who first tried to determine the religion of their victims.
India has rejected the jurisdiction of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) – an intergovernmental court outside the United Nations system whose mandate New Delhi has accepted in other cases – in the Indus Waters Treaty case brought by Pakistan to The Hague. India did not participate in any of the hearings that culminated in Monday’s ruling.
It was quick to reject the verdict, leaving Pakistan with a legal and diplomatic victory whose actual worth will now be tested.
Reactions in Islamabad and New Delhi
After India placed the treaty in abeyance in April 2025, Pakistan applied in March 2026 for the PCA to rule on the treaty’s status, arguing it could not order India to comply with an agreement that might no longer be in force.
The court invited India to take part, but India did not respond. Hearings went ahead at the Peace Palace in The Hague from April 26 to 28, 2026, with only Pakistan present.
The court examined every ground India has cited publicly: Sovereignty, Pakistan’s alleged unwillingness to renegotiate, cross-border terrorism, and changes such as demographic growth, clean-energy needs, and climate change.
The court rejected all of them, finding that no rule of international law allows a state to unilaterally suspend a treaty on the grounds that it was a sovereign nation within its rights to walk away from a pact.
Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar welcomed the ruling.
“Pakistan welcomes the unanimous Award of the Court of Arbitration today, which decisively rejects India’s unlawful attempt to place the Indus Waters Treaty ‘in abeyance’ and reaffirms that the Treaty remains fully in force and binding on both parties,” he said in a statement on X. “India must fully comply with its obligations under the Treaty and with the binding decisions of its dispute settlement mechanisms.”
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif took the message to a bigger stage the next day, telling the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Bishkek that water was “the foundation of life” in the region, sustaining the lives of millions, irrigating Pakistan’s lands and securing the future of coming generations.
It must never be used as a weapon, he said, “nor can it be used as a means of pressure, or ever employed to serve political interests”.
India, for its part, rejected the ruling within hours.
In a statement, India’s Ministry of External Affairs called the court “illegally constituted”.
Abeyance, it said, “remains in force” until Pakistan “credibly and irrevocably” ends support for cross-border attacks, a charge Islamabad denies.
The legal path and its limits
Legal experts say the ruling strengthens Pakistan’s position, even if it offers no obvious way to force India’s hand.
“This is not merely declaratory,” Ahmer Bilal Soofi, an international law expert who also served as Pakistan’s caretaker federal law minister, told Al Jazeera. “It gives Pakistan a very categorical, clear legal basis to consider countermeasures under international law, whenever it chooses to do so.”
Sikander Ahmed Shah, professor of international law at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, agreed that India’s absence from the hearings does not weaken the outcome.
“India’s non-participation doesn’t make any difference. The court has established that it has jurisdiction, and India signed the treaty,” he told Al Jazeera. “This is a PCA judgement, and its value and precedent under international law carry real weight.”
Both, however, acknowledged that there is no formal enforcement mechanism comparable to a UN Security Council order.
Pakistani officials have already set out what compliance would look like in practice.
At an international seminar on the treaty in Islamabad on June 30, Pakistan’s Indus Waters commissioner, Syed Mehar Ali Shah, called for “an immediate Commission meeting, general and special tours and inspections”.
The Permanent Indus Commission, the joint body of Pakistani and Indian officials set up to run the treaty day-to-day, has not met since May 2022.
Pakistan says India has also stopped sharing routine river-flow data and blocked site inspections since 2023, both of which the treaty requires.
Dar made a similar case in Washington on August 28, calling on both countries to “resume and strengthen the process of technical dialogue, transparency, and data sharing”.
The deputy prime minister made the remarks virtually, addressing a separate seminar on the treaty hosted by Pakistan’s embassy in Washington, three days before Monday’s ruling.
Beyond that, Soofi said, Pakistan’s options narrow to diplomatic pressure exerted at international forums.
A different kind of warning
Since India’s unilateral decision to walk away from the Indus Waters pact, Pakistani officials and military leaders have increasingly described the dispute in existential terms.
Commissioner Shah, at the June 30 seminar, called flow predictability “part of the survival architecture of the state”.
Federal Minister for Climate Change Musadik Malik, at the same event, called the dispute “a crisis of justice”, not simply one of water or climate.
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party and a former foreign minister, told the June 30 seminar that the dispute was “not a technical dispute … not a matter of paperwork, hydrology, or administrative abeyance. This is the weaponization of water.”
He asked: “How can Pakistan be expected to sustain a ceasefire when India continues to pose an existential threat?”
A few weeks later, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif went further still.
Addressing the inauguration of a war memorial in Islamabad on August 13, flanked by the army, navy and air force chiefs, a day before Pakistan’s Independence Day, he declared “every single drop of Pakistan’s water is our red line.”
He warned India would face “a crushing response with even greater force” than the May 2025 conflict if it moved against Pakistan’s water or sovereignty, according to the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan.
Hassan Abbas, an Islamabad-based hydrology and water resources expert, disagreed with the suggestion, however, that the breakdown of the pact for the moment posed an imminent threat to Pakistan.
“I don’t think there is an existential threat as such right now,” he told Al Jazeera. “The western rivers are protected by geography, not primarily by the treaty.”
India’s built storage capacity on the Chenab River is roughly 1 million acre-ft (405,000 hectare-ft), he noted, small next to Pakistan’s own seasonal irrigation needs.
“If they say they won’t let water flow, they will end up flooding themselves,” he said, since the Indian dams are run-of-river hydropower plants with little storage room.
“Once their dams are full, they have no option but to let water go,” Abbas added.
But he was also critical of Pakistan’s own water management.
Islamabad’s fixation on new mega-dams, he argued, ignores cheaper fixes. Raising irrigation efficiency could free up more water than new reservoirs will ever store, the water expert said. - Al Jazeera
Arab News Pakistan adds: The Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), brokered by the World Bank in 1960, grants Pakistan the rights to the Indus basin’s western rivers — Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab — for irrigation, drinking, and non-consumptive uses like hydropower, while India controls the eastern rivers — Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej — for unrestricted use but must not significantly alter their flow. India can use the western rivers for limited purposes such as power generation and irrigation, without storing or diverting large volumes, according to the agreement.
India announced in April 2025 that it was suspending the Treaty unilaterally after blaming Pakistan for supporting a militant attack in Indian-administered Kashmir. This drew a sharp response from Pakistan, which has consistently maintained that India does not have the right to unilaterally suspend the Treaty.
The arbitration court said it examined the potential grounds on which India could suspend or terminate the Treaty, including the grounds cited by New Delhi in its public statements.
“In a unanimous decision, the Court found that none of these grounds could justify suspension or termination of the Treaty,” the court said in a press release.
“Accordingly, the Indus Waters Treaty remains fully in force, and India must observe its obligations under the Treaty, including those relating to the design and operation of its hydro-electric projects on the Western rivers.”
The court also issued an order on Pakistan’s application, which it filed on March 4, about “interim measures” concerning the Ratle Hydroelectric Plant [RHEP].
One of the main points of dispute between India and Pakistan on the IWT is the design features of the Kishenganga (330 megawatts) and RHEP (850 megawatts) power plants. The former was inaugurated in 2018 while the latter is under construction.
The two countries disagree over whether the technical design features of these two hydroelectric plants contravene the IWT. The plants are located in India on tributaries of the Jhelum and the Chenab Rivers. The IWT designates these two rivers, as well as the Indus, as the “Western rivers” to which Pakistan has unrestricted use with some exceptions. Under the Treaty, India is permitted to construct hydroelectric power facilities on these rivers, subject to constraints including design specifications as provided for in the Treaty.
The arbitration court said Pakistan, during proceedings, had urged The Hague to address the design of certain components of the two plants. The court said the two projects are also the subject of proceedings before a neutral expert, a highly qualified engineer appointed by the World Bank.
“In a unanimous decision, the Court decided to impose measures prohibiting India from concreting the RHEP dam wall and power intake structure above certain levels until 90 days after the Neutral Expert’s final decision, which is expected in July 2027,” the court added.
In a statement, India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) rejected the court’s decision.
“India categorically rejects its so-called award, just as it has firmly rejected all prior pronouncements by this illegally constituted body,” the statement said.
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