ISLAMABAD: The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has reserved its judgement on India’s appeal for a provisional stay on the execution of one of its citizens Kulbhushan Jadhav, who was convicted of espionage and sentenced to death by Pakistan. The move came after Pakistan’s lawyer Khawar Quraishi presented his arguments on Monday. Among other things, Quraishi argued over the jurisdiction of the court to hear a case of this nature. New Delhi asked the ICJ judges on Monday to order Islamabad to stay the execution of the spy, a case that has escalated tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbours. India argued in a preliminary hearing at the UN court, formally known as the ICJ, that Pakistan had violated the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by denying the condemned man access to legal and other assistance from India. Monday’s hearings focused on India’s request for so-called “provisional measures” that can be granted at short notice to ensure a dispute between states does not deteriorate during full ICJ proceedings, which typically take several years. At the core of the dispute is the fate of Kulbhushan Sudhir Jadhav, an Indian former naval officer who was arrested in March 2016 in Balochistan. There has been a long-running conflict in Balochistan between security forces and a militant separatist movement. According to Islamabad, Jadhav confessed to being tasked by India’s intelligence service with planning, coordinating and organising espionage and sabotage activities in Balochistan “aiming to destabilise and wage war against Pakistan”. In April, a Pakistani military court sentenced him to death. No date was set for the execution. Pakistan has said Jadhav’s conviction and sentence remain open to appeal. India’s representative at the ICJ hearing, Deepak Mittal, described the charges against Jadhav as “concocted” and his trial as “farcical.” The ICJ is the UN court for resolving disputes between nations, and its decisions are final and binding. However, it has no means to enforce rulings and they have occasionally been ignored. In a similar dispute over the Vienna Convention in 1999, the ICJ ordered the United States not to execute a German national who did not get proper consular assistance, but the man was put to death regardless. After a 2004 ruling against the United States in a case brought by Mexico, the administration of then-President George W Bush ordered reviews of dozens of cases of Mexicans on US death row who had not been offered consular access as a remedy. The US Supreme Court later ruled that under the US federal system, individual states are not obliged to comply with the international treaty, a contradiction that has yet to be resolved.
