Big win for India on Kulbhushan Jadhav, but ball back in Pakistan court
The International Court of Justice’s verdict in the Kulbhushan Jadhav case comes at a time when India-Pakistan relations are in deep freeze. The court very rightly ruled that Pakistan had deprived India its right to communicate with and have access to Jadhav, who Pakistan arrested and accused of espionage.
The ICJ also extended the stay on the Pakistan military court’s sentence of executing Jadhav, contending that it “constitutes an indispensable condition for the effective review and reconsideration of his conviction and sentence”.
The only sour note is that the court did not allow India’s plea to annul the military court’s order and also for Jadhav’s release and return to India. However, with this judgment, the ICJ has lived up to its reputation of impartiality.
The ICJ verdict makes it incumbent upon Pakistan to now try Jadhav in a civilian court if it chooses to press ahead with the spying charges against him. In fact, it turns out that Pakistan itself had said the appropriate remedy in this case would be a “review and reconsideration of the (military court’s) conviction and sentence,” pointing out that the Peshawar High Court in 2018 set aside more than 70 convictions and sentences handed down by military courts.
It told the ICJ that “its domestic legal system provides for an established and defined process whereby the civil courts can undertake a substantive review of the decisions of military tribunals in order to ensure (that) procedural fairness has been afforded to the accused”.
The Jadhav case is both a lesson and an opportunity for Pakistan to stop using terror as an instrument of state policy against India and to improve ties with New Delhi. Recently, India scored a major diplomatic victory when the UN-designated Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Maulana Masood Azhar, the Mumbai attack mastermind, as an international terrorist.
On Wednesday, days ahead of Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s meeting with US President Donald Trump, Islamabad was forced to arrest the banned Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed.
As for India, the diplomatic challenge before New Delhi is to make Pakistan drop the charges against Jadhav and bring him back.