THE HAGUE: The International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) verdict in the case of Kulbhushan Jadhav, a serving Indian naval commander who had been awarded death sentence by Pakistan on charges of espionage, came with a detailed dissenting note authored by Justice Tassaduq Hussain Jillani, an ad hoc judge of the court.
Justice Jillani wrote that the court should have found India’s application to be inadmissible because its conduct amounted to abuse of rights. He recalled that the 2008 agreement between India and Pakistan specifically governed questions of consular access and assistance in cases of arrest and detention on national security grounds.
Pakistan lawfully withheld consular access and assistance while examining the case of Jadhav on its merits. Even if the Vienna Convention was applicable in the case, Pakistan had committed no breach of its Article 36 because the country had already in place the procedures necessary for ensuring effective review and reconsideration of the conviction and sentence of Jadhav, he said.
Vienna Convention doesn’t apply to spies, according to ICJ’s ad hoc judge
Justice Jillani said in his dissenting note: “The Court’s judgment appears to set a dangerous precedent at the times when states are increasingly confronted with transnational terrorist activities and impending threats to national security. Terrorism has become a systemic weapon of war and nations would ignore it at their own peril. Such threats may legitimately justify certain limits to be imposed on the scope of application of Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, in the bilateral relations between any two states at any given time.”