OIC calls emergency meeting on Kashmir on June 22

ISLAMABAD: The Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s (OIC) contact group on Jammu and Kashmir will hold an emergency foreign ministerial meeting via video conference on June 22 to discuss the prevailing situation in Kashmir, the OIC said in a Twitter post on Sunday.
The meeting will bring together the foreign ministers of the Jammu and Kashmir Contact Group member states, Azerbaijan, Niger, Pakistan Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
“The meeting is part of a series of continuous #JammuAndKashmir Contact Group meetings to address the issue,” OIC Secretary General Dr. Yousef Al-Othaimeen said in a Twitter post.
OIC has 57 member countries with a total population of nearly 1.85 billion people, which makes it the second largest intergovernmental organization after the United Nations (UN).
Last month, on May 20, OIC’s human rights body strongly condemned and rejected the Indian government’s recently introduced residency law for the disputed part of Kashmir under its administrative control, and urged the UN to play its role in this regard.
In a statement, the Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission (IPHRC) of the OIC said India was “illegally” altering the demographic composition of the Muslim majority in Kashmir during the global pandemic.
On Saturday evening, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it strongly condemned the unabated “extra-judicial killings of Kashmiri youth” in Indian-administered Kashmir, and said more than 110 innocent Kashmiris had been martyred by Indian forces in five months, alleging “fake ‘encounters’ and so-called ‘cordon-and-search’ operations.”
“In the last two days alone, another 8 Kashmiris have been martyred in Pulwama and Shopian,” the foreign office statement continued.
It added that the international community must take immediate cognizance of the persistent reports of “arbitrary and extra-judicial killings” in Indian-administered Kashmir.