Chandigarh: Amid concerns over India’s Citizenship Amendment Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC), United Nations chief Antonio Guterres has said it is necessary to do everything to prevent “statelessness” when a citizenship law is changed.
Antonio Guterres raised his concerns during last day of his three-day visit to Pakistan. As per reports, when it was asked that whether he was concerned about new laws in India during an interview, said, “Of course. Because this is an area in which the relevant UN body is quite active.”
“The present High Commissioner for Refugees is quite active to this situation, like many others like this. Because there is risk of statelessness created by those national laws,” the UN secretary general told Dawn News TV.
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Notably, India’s new amendment to its’ citizenship laws has drawn voices of grave concerns both domestically and internationally. After the enactment of the law, protests erupted across the Indian peninsula over fears that it may marginalise the minority Muslim community.
While the Indian ruling regime has maintained that the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) is an internal matter, the international bodies are saying that it would lead to crisis of ‘stateless’ people. The city legislature of Seattle in USA formally passed a resolution against India’s CAA and NRC.
On Kashmir, UN Chief reportedly said all the reports, including two by the UN High Commissioner, in the international media, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and recent fact-finding reports on Kashmir released in New Delhi, regarding torture, sexual abuse and incarceration of children as young as seven by the Indian military played an important role in “clarifying exactly what is happening” there and “it is essential that these reports are taken seriously”.
A report in The Dawn states that [w]hen asked by this scribe why the UN has failed to constitute a high-powered inquiry commission to go to the Indian occupied valley and investigate the atrocities committed there, the secretary general said: “Only the governing bodies of the UN or the Security Council can make that decision, but these reports are credible, relevant and very important.”