Over 30 civil society and rights organisations worldwide have together asked the Indian government to immediately and unconditionally free Kashmiri journalist and rights defender Irfan Mehraj, who completes three years of detention on Friday.
In a joint statement, they have urged the Centre to end the “continued repression of human rights defenders and journalists in Jammu and Kashmir”.
The National Investigation Agency had detained Mehraj on March 20, 2023, on terror and other charges that the statement by the 33 organisations has termed “politically motivated and fabricated”.
Mehraj was the founding editor of the Wande Magazine and worked with the TwoCircles.net website besides reporting for several international media organisations such as Deutsche Welle and Al Jazeera.
The signatories to the plea for his release include Amnesty International, the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances, Korean House for International Solidarity, World Organisation Against Torture, World Alliance for Citizen Participation, Front Line Defenders, the Taiwan Association for Human Rights, and Think Centre Singapore.
A few weeks ago, the Human Rights Foundation and the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development had lodged a complaint on Mehraj’s behalf with the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, asking it to declare his detention as arbitrary and a violation of international law.
The latest statement said the NIA had detained Mehraj for being “a close associate of Khurram Parvez”, whom it described as an “HRD (human rights defender) and the programme coordinator of the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), a leading civil society organisation”.
It added: “Indian authorities continue to arbitrarily detain Khurram Parvez for over four years now on politically motivated and fabricated charges.”
The statement said the detentions of the two men “highlight a broader pattern of persecution of human rights defenders and journalists in Jammu and Kashmir”.
“The authorities have used the UAPA — a draconian anti-terror law — and the repressive Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act (PSA), which permits long-term detention without trial, to criminalise and silence journalists and human rights defenders in Jammu and Kashmir. This has worsened since the unilateral abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood in August 2019,” it said.
“In recent months, the police continued to harass and intimidate journalists from Indian-administered Kashmir for their reporting, including through summoning them for repeated police interrogations and demanding that journalists sign a bond undertaking that they will not do anything that would ‘disturb peace’.”
The statement went on: “India should respect its international human rights obligations and end its reprisal against human rights defenders and journalists, especially in Jammu and Kashmir. Other countries at the UN Human Rights Council should address these flagrant violations by a sitting member state.”
The statement urged the authorities to repeal the “repressive laws including the UAPA and the PSA and to create an enabling environment for civil society and the media to freely and independently operate in Jammu and Kashmir”.
In 2022, media watchdog Press Council of India had said 49 journalists had been arrested in the Valley since 2016 and accused the government of “slowly choking the media in the Valley due to extensive curbs”.
More arrests of journalists followed in recent years, although most of them were released on court orders.
Earlier, the government had declared the Kashmir Press Club, the biggest body of Valley journalists, as illegal and taken over its premises in Srinagar.
