Kashmir stays on UNSC agenda list for this year

The Jammu and Kashmir dispute remains on the United Nation Security Council's agenda, a UN spokesman stated on Monday, and rejected the reports that suggested it had been removed from the list of unresolved issues.

"Some articles today on Kashmir are inaccurate," the Daily Times quoted UN spokesman Farhan Haq, as saying, referring to those reports.

Haq said that the latest list of matters the Security Council is seized with "continues to include the agenda item under which the council has taken up Kashmir, which, by a decision of the council, remains on the list for this year."

Earlier, a spokesman for the Pakistan's mission to the UN had clarified that Pakistan's acting ambassador to the world body, Amjad Hussain Sial, in his speech to the General Assembly on November 12 had referred to the omission of Jammu and Kashmir dispute in a statement by the President of the Security Council, and not from its annual report, as reported in a section of the press.

"The agenda item entitled, 'India and Pakistan Question', which covers the Jammu and Kashmir dispute, is duly mentioned in the annual report of the Security Council and is also present on its agenda," spokesman Mian Jehangir Iqbal said in a statement.

While presenting the annual report to the 192-member assembly, British Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant had not mentioned the Kashmir dispute in the context of unresolved long-running situations, despite the fact that it was included in the annual report.

"We understand this was an inadvertent omission, as Jammu and Kashmir is one of the oldest disputes on the agenda of the Security Council," Sial had remarked after Grant's statement.

Meanwhile, Pakistan's Ambassador to the UN, Abdullah Hussain Haroon, who is on a visit to Pakistan, said that there was no question of the Kashmir issue being dropped from the Security Council's agenda.

"The Security Council Report, in its annexure, is explicit," he said in a statement, adding, "The President of the Security Council, the Permanent Representative of the UK, is amply clear on the subject and is cognisant of the matter. I would request all concerned not to speculate unnecessarily upon the subject."