Protests and seminars today marked the International Human Rights Day in Kashmir, being observed all over the world.
The day commemorates the first global declaration to guarantee fundamental rights for all. The theme for International Human Rights Day 2015 is ‘Our Rights. Our Freedoms. Always’.
On this occasion, the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), headed by its chairperson Parveena Ahanger, today staged a sit-in in the Press Enclave area of Srinagar.
They paid tributes to thousands of disappeared persons from Jammu and Kashmir, where more than 8,000 cases of forced disappearance had been reported by human rights activists since 1989.
“As a repository of individual stories of loss and grief, the APDP is creating a collective biography of struggle as its members meet and gather on the 10th every month in a public place as an act of remembering, commemorating and grieving”, the group said in its statement.
It appealed to the international community to “act as pressure groups upon the Indian state” to take note of the situation and take corrective measures to render justice.
To mark the International Human Rights Day, the Kashmir High Court Bar Association today held a daylong seminar, to which Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, leader of the moderate Hurriyat Conference faction, was invited as a speaker.
The moderate Hurriyat Conference faction organised a seminar on the human rights situation in Jammu and Kashmir on Wednesday.
In his address, Mirwaiz appreciated the role played by lawyers in defending the human rights of Kashmiris on the legal front. He claimed that the human rights of people in the Kashmir valley were being violated on a daily basis.
Mirwaiz further said the rights of people of Jammu and Kashmir were being “usurped” in the garb of “black laws” like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and the Public Safety Act.
He termed the people elected to the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly as “collaborators”, saying it was the people in the Assembly who made these laws and gave sanctity to these laws by their “stamp of approval”.
Mirwaiz said he apprehended that the three persons missing from Kupwara might be subjected to the same fate as was meted out to victims of the infamous Machil fake encounter of 2010, in which three Kashmiri youths were killed and passed off as infiltrators by the Army.
Highlighting the human rights situation in Kashmir, Independent lawmaker and Awami Itihad Party chief Engineer Rashid today paraded a cow, a horse, a goat and a dog on the streets of Srinagar to show that “animals had more rights than human beings” in this part of the world.
Talking to mediapersons on the occasion, Engineer Rashid said, “Kashmiris are being treated worse than animals and are being denied every fundamental right.”
Protests, Seminars marks International Human Rights Day
