No second consular access to jailed Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav: Pak

Pakistan said on Thursday it had no plans to give India consular access again to Kulbhushan Jadhav, a former naval officer currently on death row after being convicted of alleged involvement in espionage and subversive activities. Asked at a regular news briefing about Pakistan giving consular access to Jadhav again, Foreign Office spokesman Mohammad Faisal said: “There is no other meeting.” Faisal did not give any further details. Pakistan had on September 2 granted India consular access to Jadhav, 49, for the first time since his arrest in 2016. The charge d’affaires of the Indian high commission in Islamabad, Gaurav Ahluwalia, met Jadhav at a “sub-jail” in Rawalpindi. In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Pakistan had violated Jadhav’s rights under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and sought a review of his death sentence. “While we await a comprehensive report, it was clear that Shri Jadhav appeared to be under extreme pressure to parrot a false narrative to bolster Pakistan’s untenable claims. We will decide a further course of action after receiving a detailed report from (Ahluwalia) and determining the extent of conformity to the ICJ directives,” external affairs ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar had said on September 2. Indian diplomat’s meeting with Jadhav came a month after a similar interaction between Indian officials and Jadhav did not materialise amid differences between New Delhi and Islamabad on the terms of the consular access to the retired Indian navy officer. The initial offer of conditional access by Pakistan was rejected by India, which demanded “unimpeded” contact with the Indian national In reply to another question on Pakistan proposing a service fee of $20 on Indian pilgrims using the Kartarpur Corridor, Faisal said this amount was meant to cover part of the expenditure on the construction of facilities for the pilgrims on the Pakistani side. “This is meant to cover 10 per cent to 15 per cent of the costs, which is only a small part of the expenditure,” he said. Source: Hindustan Times