UN: Hope everyone’s rights are protected
UNITED NATIONS: A spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres during the daily press briefing on Thursday has said the world body “hopes” that in India and any country that is having elections, people’s “political and civil rights” are “protected” and everyone is able to vote in a “free and fair” atmosphere.
Spokesperson for the Secretary-General Stephane Dujarric made these remarks on Thursday while he was responding to a question on the “political unrest” in India ahead of the upcoming national elections in the wake of the arrest of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and the freezing of the opposition Congress Party’s bank accounts.
The response from the United Nations comes a day after the US also reacted to a similar question on Kejriwal’s arrest and freezing of the Congress party’s bank accounts.
On Wednesday, hours after India summoned a senior US diplomat to protest remarks on Kejriwal’s arrest, Washington reiterated that it encourages fair, transparent, timely legal processes.
On the US diplomat being summoned in Delhi, US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller said “I’m not going to talk about any private diplomatic conversations. But of course what we have said publicly is what I just said from here, that we encourage fair, transparent, timely legal processes. We don’t think anyone should object to that, and we’ll make the same thing clear privately.”
On Thursday, India said the US State Department’s recent remarks on the arrest of Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal are “unwarranted” and asserted the country is “proud of its independent and robust democratic institutions” and committed to protect them from any form of undue external influences.
Any “external imputation” on India’s electoral and legal processes is “completely unacceptable”, MEA Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said in New Delhi during his weekly press briefing.
In India, legal processes are driven “only by the rule of law,” Jaiswal said on
Thursday.