Kashmir tops bill in U.N. Pakistan visit

Mary Robinson

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Kashmir has dominated talks between U.N. human rights chief Mary Robinson and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, with both agreeing the disputed Himalayan region faced serious rights violations.

While the Pakistani leader stressed the need to resolve "massive human rights abuses" in the Indian-ruled part of Kashmir, Robinson said the situation would remain unresolved while both countries remained in conflict.

"I am very clear that it's a human rights situation and it will be important for me to appraise this perspective, the extent of the human rights situation, extra-judicial killings, torture, etcetera," Robinson was quoted as saying by Associated Press Pakistan (APP).

"In reality we could do much more on the human rights side if there was political will to reach an agreement on both sides, but that's the stark reality of this," she said.

Indian officials say more than 33,000 people have died in a 12-year-old separatist Muslim insurgency. Pakistan and the separatists put the toll at 80,000.

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India has rejected demands to allow human rights groups to visit the Himalayan state divided between India, Pakistan and China and shunned Pakistani appeals for peace talks, saying Islamabad must first stop what it terms "cross-border terrorism."

India controls about 45 percent of Kashmir, Pakistan a third of the territory and China the remainder.

Robinson welcomed Musharraf's initiatives for reducing tension along the borders with India and the offer of dialogue and also urged Islamabad to sign all the six U.N. conventions on human rights, APP said.

"The president saw merit of a holistic approach while pointing out that we had to take steps which are practical in our specific environment," the agency said.

A U.S. State Department annual report released earlier this month said Pakistan's human rights record over the past year remained "poor," and cited extra-judicial killings blamed on police, exile of politicians and lack of freedom for the judiciary.

Islamabad has not yet signed three of the U.N. conventions on human rights.

Women's rights

Before Robinson met Musharraf, her press officer Veronique Taveau told Reuters she would "express all the concerns that she has in the region -- women, on violence against women, on minorities, on Muslim groups etc."

The U.N. rights advocate endorsed Pakistan's assured 33 percent representation of women at the district government level and the increase in reserved seats for women in the Provincial and National Assemblies as important steps towards the promotion of human rights.

Robinson also discussed with Musharraf recent Hindu-Muslim violence in the western Indian state of Gujarat in which more than 700 people have been killed, APP said, but gave no details.

The U.N. human rights chief, who also met Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar earlier on Monday, is due to meet the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and other non-government organizations on Tuesday in the eastern city of Lahore.

Pakistan is the last leg of Robinson's tour that also took her to Egypt, Bahrain, Lebanon and Afghanistan.

A former Irish president, Robinson became the top U.N. rights official nearly five years ago. She will report back to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, whose annual six-week session opens in Geneva on March 18.

Tensions escalated between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan after a bloody December attack on the Indian parliament that New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based Kashmiri militants. That attack triggered the massing of up to a million troops along the shared borders and the stand-off shows no sign of easing.