Hope that in India 'everyone's rights' are 'protected', says UN Spokesperson
"Hope people are able to vote in 'free & fair' atmosphere"
United Nations (PTI): A spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres 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.
"What we very much hope that in India, as in any country that is having elections, that everyone's rights are protected, including political and civil rights, and everyone is able to vote in an atmosphere that is free and fair," Dujarric said at the daily press briefing Thursday.
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."
Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) officials summoned Acting Deputy Chief of Mission Gloria Berbena to their office in South Block in the Indian capital. The meeting lasted for more than 30 minutes.
On Thursday, India said the US State Department's recent remarks on the arrest of Delhi Chief Minister 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.
Earlier on Wednesday, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had said in a statement that India took strong objection to the remarks of the Spokesperson of the US State Department about certain legal proceedings in India.
"India's legal processes are based on an independent judiciary which is committed to objective and timely outcomes. Casting aspersions on that is unwarranted," the MEA had said.
The Enforcement Directorate has arrested Kejriwal in a money laundering case linked to the excise policy 'scam'.
The case pertains to alleged corruption and money laundering in formulating and executing the Delhi government's excise policy for 2021-22 which was later scrapped.
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A strong magnitude 6.1 earthquake shakes Indonesia's Java Island, felt in Jakarta
Jakarta, Apr 27: A strong magnitude 6.1 earthquake shook the southern part of Indonesia's main island of Java on Saturday, but there were no immediate reports of injury or significant property damage.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake struck 102 kilometers (63 miles) south of Banjar city at a depth of 68.3 kilometers (42.4 miles). There was no tsunami warning.
High-rises in the capital Jakarta swayed for around a minute and two-story homes shook strongly in the West Java provincial capital of Bandung and in Jakarta's satellite cities of Depok, Tangerang, Bogor and Bekasi. The quake was also felt in other cities in West Java, Yogyakarta and East Java province, according to Indonesia's Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysical Agency.
The agency warned of possible aftershocks.
Earthquakes are frequent across the sprawling archipelago nation, but they are rarely felt in Jakarta.
Indonesia, a seismically active archipelago of 270 million people, is prone to seismic upheaval because of its location on major geological faults known as the Pacific “Ring of Fire.”
A magnitude 5.6 earthquake in 2022 killed at least 602 people in West Java's Cianjur city. It was the deadliest in Indonesia since a 2018 quake and tsunami in Sulawesi killed more than 4,300 people.
In 2004, an extremely powerful Indian Ocean quake set off a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia's Aceh province.
