OTTAWA: Canada’s third-largest federal political party, NDP (New Democratic Party) has expressed serious concern over the prevailing grim situation in occupied Kashmir.
Kashmir Media Service reported that the NDP Foreign Affairs Critic, Guy Caron, in a statement said: “New Democrats are deeply concerned about reports of the Indian government’s crackdown in recent days in Kashmir.”
He said, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently took steps to revoke Article 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.
“Like Amnesty International and other civil society groups, we are troubled by such actions, which provide 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,” he said.
Guy Caron said that Canada’s Liberal Party government must find the courage to firmly communicate these human rights concerns to the 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,” he added.
