May 3, 2023
Dear Representatives of G20 Member Countries, Guest Countries and Invited International Organizations:
We, members of the Kashmir Scholars Consultative Action Network [and allied organizations], urge you to withdraw from G20 meetings planned for Indian-administered Kashmir (IAK) (including those reportedly being held on May 11 and May 22-24, 2023). We further urge your countries and organizations to immediately comply with your duties under international law and cooperate to end the Indian state’s serious breaches of peremptory legal norms in IAK – including the illegal occupation, annexation and colonization of IAK and the commission of atrocity crimes and grave human rights violations in the region.
As acknowledged by the UN and the Security Council, IAK is a territory illegally occupied by India. Under international humanitarian law – note that an occupation constitutes an armed conflict – India, as the occupying power, is the temporary administrator of the territory. The UN Security Council has accordingly mandated external self-determination – through the democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite – for the territory since April 21, 1948. While the international community has failed to defend democracy and human rights in IAK for 75 years, a prolonged occupation is still an occupation.
India’s claims that IAK is its “integral part” and its attempts to make permanent its occupation of IAK constitute illegal acts of annexation. India’s authoritarian domination of the people of IAK and denial of the exercise of their right to self-determination constitute illegal colonialism. The UN Security Council has explicitly mandated that India secure the rights and freedoms of the people of IAK, including their rights to free expression, a free press, free assembly, freedom to travel, and freedom from coercion and intimidation, since April 21, 1948. However, India has repressed the people of IAK, with impunity, including through well-documented, rampant war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Indian forces over many decades. Despite knowledge of such violations (which are ongoing), the international community has failed to secure accountability and access to justice for the people of IAK.
The already dire humanitarian and human rights situation in IAK has substantially deteriorated since August 5, 2019 when Indian authorities illegally dismantled guarantees protecting the territorial and cultural integrity of IAK and its people’s rights to their land, educational access and local employment. Indian authorities have imposed a barrage of new, violative laws and policies on IAK predicated on earlier illegalities condemned by the UN Security Council. By delivering on the decades-old declared policy goals of militant, ethnonationalist Hindu supremacists, the Indian government has achieved the disintegration of IAK; the economic and social disempowerment of its Muslim population; and the near-total domination of Muslims of IAK via expropriation of land, destruction of common and private property, various forms of illegal and invasive surveillance, extraction of resources, ecological destruction, and the rapid expansion of forced and illegal demographic change in favor of non-local Hindus. (Indian authorities’ repression has targeted the majority Kashmiri Muslim population which has most vocally stood for the human rights and fundamental freedoms of the people of IAK.)
While atrocity crimes and grave violations remain ongoing, Indian authorities have systematically eliminated Kashmiris’ remaining means of defending their human rights, specifically targeting Kashmiri human rights defenders and others who engage in human rights-related work – including journalists, scholars and political activists – by framing them as “narrative” or “intellectual terrorists.” Amnesty International has described this as “a system of laws, policies and practices that systematically annihilate critical voices and violate the rights to freedom of expression and opinion of journalists and human rights defenders.” Through repression and collective punishment, Indian authorities have silenced Kashmiris at large and deprived them of the right to assemble and dissent, bringing all media in IAK under state control via Orwellian policies and systematic harassment.
India’s hosting of G20 meetings and ”promotion of tourism” in IAK are part of Indian authorities’ sophisticated and longstanding disinformation campaign to project “normalcy” in IAK – which both erases the reality of authoritarianism and extreme state violence in IAK and furthers Indian impunity. India has long denied the international community – critically including the international media, international human rights groups and the UN Human Rights Council’s special procedures – free access to IAK. Since August 2019, Indian authorities have only permitted two visits by representatives of the international community: a visit of far-right European MEPs in October 2019 and a visit by select international journalists in December 2020. Both visits were state-managed disinformation initiatives to promote the facade of “normalcy” in IAK.
Your attendance in India’s G20 meetings will go beyond the international community’s historic failures in IAK by violating your duty not to aid or assist in serious breaches of peremptory norms through direct complicity in India’s illegal occupation, annexation, colonization, atrocity crimes, grave human rights violations and impunity in IAK. You would be committing such serious violations of international law despite the genocidal climate in which Kashmiris – a defenseless, marginalized and demonized group – face imminent, material risk of mass atrocities. It would be unfathomable for many of you to attend a Russian-sponsored international meeting in Russian-occupied Crimea at this time. Attending an Indian-sponsored G20 meeting in IAK at this time is, in legal and moral terms, demonstrably worse. We urge you to comply with your duty to promote through joint and separate actions the realization of the democratic and human rights of the people of IAK, critically including the right to self-determination, and to render assistance to the UN to hasten an end to India’s colonization of IAK.
We thank you for your attention.
Sincerely,
Kashmir Scholars Consultative and Action Network (KSCAN)
Supporting organizations:
1. Americans for Kashmir
2. Kashmir Law and Justice Project
3. Campaign Against Racism
4. Canadian Foreign Policy Institute
5. Friends of Sabeel North America
6. India Labour Solidarity, UK
7. Indian Social Action Forum
8. International Solidarity for Academic Freedom in India (InSAF India)
9. Islamophobia Studies Center, University of California, Berkeley
10. International Coalition Against Enforced Disappearances
11. Just Peace Advocates
12. Project South
13. South Asian Dalit and Adivasi Network-Canada
14. StandWithKashmir
15. University Network for Human Rights
16. World Beyond War
Also Endorsed by:
17. Al Quds Toronto
18. Association of Cooperate Agribusiness Farmers (ACAF-SL) Sierra Leone
19. BDS Vancouver/Coast Salish Territories
20. Canadian BDS Coalition
21. Canadian Council for Justice and Peace
22. Canadian Voices for Palestinians Rights
23. Canadians for Peace and Justice in Kashmir
24. CERAS (Centre sur l’asie du sud), Montreal
25. Chrysalis Theatre, Canada
26. Free Kashmiri Political Prisoners, USA
27. Free Palestine Halifax, Canada
28. Friends of Kashmir, Canada
29. Gaza Dream, Palestine
30. Good Shepherd Collective, Palestine
31. Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War, Canada
32. HR4A (Human Rights for All) Saskatchewan
33. Intellectuals for Peace and development (INSPAD), Pakistan
34. Justice for All, US
35. Justice for All, Canada
36. Kashmir Institute of International Relations, Pakistan
37. Let Kashmir Decide Global Coalition
38. Montreal for a World BEYOND War
39. Oakville Palestinian Rights Organization, Canada
40. Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Cape Town, South Africa
41. Palestinian and Jewish Unity (PAJU), Montreal
42. People Against Apartheid and Fascism (PAAF), South Africa
43. Punjabi Literary and Cultural Association Winnipeg
44. Quebec Public Interest Research Group
45. Ramadhan Foundation, Manchester, UK
46. Regina Peace Council, Canada
47. Socialist Action in the Canadian state
48. South Asian Diaspora Action Collective, Montreal
49. Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice, International & USA
50. World Kashmir Awareness Forum, US
51. Youth for Kashmir, UK
See the post:
KSCAN and scores of other organizations call for boycott of G20 meetings in Kashmir
