Srinagar

Both India and Pakistan on Wednesday countered each other at UN Security Council over the Kashmir issue. India hoped that the new government of Prime Minister Imran Khan in Pakistan would work constructively to build the region.

“Pacific settlement (of disputes) requires pacific intent in thinking and Pacific content in action,” news gatherer IANS quoted India’s Permanent Representative Syed Akbaruddin as saying at the Council suggesting a new approach for the new government.

“Regurgitating failed approach which has long been rejected is neither reflective of pacific intent nor a display of pacific content,” he emphasised after Pakistan’s Permanent Representative Maleeha Lodhi suggested the Council should resuscitate initiatives on Kashmir from 70 years ago, the report said.

The report further quoted Akbaruddin saying “We hope that the new government of Pakistan will, rather than indulge in polemics, work constructively to build a safe, secure and developed South Asian region free of violence.”

The session on mediation and settlement of disputes was presided over by Tariq Mahmood Ahmad, the British Minister of State for the Commonwealth and the UN.

Lodhi referred to decades-old failed Council efforts and invoked the 1948 Council resolution setting up the UN Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP) for investigating and mediating the Kashmir dispute, the report mentioned.

Islamabad has failed to keep that assurance and ironically, Lodhi asserted that the Council’s failure to resolve the Kashmir dispute put its credibility was at stake. Lodhi suggested that the Council could refer disputes to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for an advisory opinion under the UN Charter, the report said.

She went further offering her own interpretation of the Charter’s provisions for the Council’s intervention in threats to peace and claimed that it could even unilaterally enforce an advisory opinion from the ICJ over-riding the principle that parties to the dispute have to agree to the court’s jurisdiction, IANS reported.

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