Islamabad, 8 November 2021 (TDI): Ambassador Yousef Aldobeay, the OIC’s Special Envoy for Jammu and Kashmir, will visit Pakistan and the Azad Jammu and Kashmir from November 7 to 12, 2021. The Special Envoy will be accompanied by a high-level delegation that includes the OIC’s Assistant Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, Ambassador Tarig Bakhit, and other senior officials.
📣: @OIC_OCI Special Envoy for Jammu & #Kashmir Amb Yousef Aldobeay leading HL delegation to🇵🇰 & AJK from 7-12 Nov. Visit will reaffirm OIC’s strong support and solidarity for the Kashmiri people.
🔗: ⬇️ https://t.co/V8lieu9Tob
— Spokesperson 🇵🇰 MoFA (@ForeignOfficePk) November 6, 2021
According to foreign ministry release, the Special Envoy will hold discussions on the dire situation in India’s illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir, including peace and security, human rights, humanitarian aid, and legal issues (IIOJK). His visit will emphasise the importance of a just resolution to the Jammu and Kashmir conflict for long-term peace in South Asia.
The Special Envoy will meet with a cross-section of Kashmiri society, including the True Representatives of the Kashmiri People, during his visit to Azad Jammu and Kashmir. The group will tour a model hamlet in the IIOJK that houses Kashmiris forcibly displaced from their homes by Indian occupation forces, as well as meet women and children who have been victims of India’s cross-LoC breaches. These meetings will give the Special Envoy a firsthand assessment of the intensity of the situation in the IIOJK and along the Line of Control.
The presence of the Assistant Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs is especially important in following up on the OIC’s call at the 47th session of the Council of Ministers in November 2020, in Niamey, Niger, to investigate and analyse the IIOJK’s flagrant abuses of international human rights and humanitarian norms, with a focus on the COVID-19 pandemic.
The OIC’s Special Envoy on Jammu and Kashmir, appointed by the 14th OIC Summit in Makkah in 2019, has played a key role in directing the Organization’s principled approach on this issue. In March 2020, the Special Envoy visited Pakistan and Azad Jammu and Kashmir. In Niamey, he presented his first report to the 47th CFM. The OIC reaffirmed its support for the legitimate fight of the Kashmiri people for their fundamental right to self-determination, among other things, in the report.
It also called on OIC Member States to work together to support the Jammu and Kashmir dispute in international forums.
The OIC Contact Group on Jammu and Kashmir at the level of Foreign Ministers met on the fringes of the 76th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 23, 2021, as part of the OIC’s broad-based and comprehensive involvement on the Jammu and Kashmir problem. The OIC’s unequivocal support for the legitimate struggle of the Kashmiri people for their right to self-determination, as enshrined in UNSC resolutions, was reaffirmed in a Joint Communique issued on the occasion, which also firmly condemned India’s illegal and unilateral actions of August 5, 2019, and onwards.
A delegation from the OIC’s Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission (IPHRC) travelled to Pakistan and Azad Jammu & Kashmir.
