India arrests Kashmir human rights defender under anti-terror law

India's National Investigation Agency (NIA) has arrested a prominent Kashmiri human rights defender, Khurram Parvez, under anti-terror law.

The NIA, aided by police and paramilitary soldiers, raided the home and office of Khurram Parvez in Srinagar on Monday and searched them for many hours, said his wife Samina, who uses only one name.

NIA officials also seized Parvez's phone, laptop, books and two of his wife's mobile phones during searches at his home.

"They said it's a case of 'terror funding'," Samina said. She believes Parvez was questioned at the camp office throughout the day.

The NIA did not immediately issue a statement about the arrest or raids, but an arrest warrant shows that Parvez was arrested under various sections of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).

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'Disturbing'

Mary Lawlor, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders, called Parvez's arrest "disturbing". "He's not a terrorist, he's a human rights defender," she said in a tweet.

Parvez, 42,  is one of Kashmir's best known activists and head of the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), a group of rights organisations in disputed Kashmir.

NIA officers searched the JKCCS offices for more than 14 hours.

The rights group has monitored violence in the region for more than three decades and has exposed rights violations by Indian government forces including torture, extra-judicial killings and unmarked mass graves in numerous reports.

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Last week, it criticised security forces for killing civilians during a controversial shootout with alleged rebels in Srinagar whose bodies were hurriedly buried by Indian police in a remote graveyard without their families present.

The Indian government has increasingly wielded the anti-terror law against rights activists, journalists and dissidents in Kashmir.

The crackdown worsened particularly after August 2019, when India scrapped the disputed region’s special status, annulled its separate constitution, split the region into t wo federal territories and removed inherited protections on land and jobs.

Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan, and both claim the region in its entirety. Most Kashmiris support the rebel goal of uniting the territory, either under Pakistani rule or as an independent country.

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