India Dismisses Indus Tribunal’s Award Affirming Jurisdiction Despite Treaty ‘Abeyance’

New Delhi: India on Friday (June 27) rejected a procedural ruling on the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) by the Court of Arbitration in The Hague that it has long boycotted, which stated that India's decision to hold the treaty “in abeyance” would have no bearing on the tribunal’s jurisdiction.

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) described the five-member tribunal as an “illegally-constituted so-called Court of Arbitration”, and reiterated that any findings from it would not be binding on India.

“India has never recognised the existence in law of this so-called Court of Arbitration, and India’s position has all along been that the constitution of this so-called arbitral body is in itself a serious breach of the Indus Waters Treaty and consequently any proceedings before this forum and any award or decision taken by it are also for that reason illegal and per se void,” said the MEA's press release.

On April 23, a day after a terror attack on tourists in Kashmir's Pahalgam, India announced that it was placing the 1960 IWT “in abeyance with immediate effect, until Pakistan credibly and irrevocably abjures its support for cross-border terrorism.”

Pakistan responded that there was no provision in the treaty that allowed it to be suspended unilaterally.

The ‘supplemental award’ was made by the Court of Arbitration, which was set up by the World Bank in 2016 based on Pakistan's request.

India had pushed instead for referring the matter to a Neutral Expert.

The World Bank, which has a procedural role under the treaty, initially paused both mechanisms but lifted the freeze in 2022 and allowed them to proceed simultaneously, despite India’s objections.

India refused to participate in the tribunal's proceedings, though Pakistan continued with both tracks, including a meeting of the Neutral Expert in Vienna in September 2023.

Following India’s announcement on the treaty and several days of military exchanges between the two countries, the Court of Arbitration issued an order on May 16 inviting both parties to address whether these recent developments affected the proceedings of either the court or the Neutral Expert.

India did not respond, but Pakistan asked the tribunal to rule on the issue.

In its June 27 ruling, the Court of Arbitration found that “India’s position that it is holding the Treaty in ‘abeyance’, however that position may be characterised as a matter of international law, does not deprive the Court of Arbitration of competence.” It said the same applied to the Neutral Expert proceedings.

In its response, the MEA said that India’s act of keeping the treaty in “abeyance” was an “exercise of its rights as a sovereign nation under international law” and firmly rejected the tribunal’s decision.

“India, therefore, categorically rejects this so-called supplemental award as it has rejected all prior pronouncements of this body,” the statement said.

The MEA described the ruling as the “latest charade at Pakistan’s behest” and accused Islamabad of using the proceedings to deflect attention from its record on terrorism.

“Pakistan's resort to this fabricated arbitration mechanism is consistent with its decades-long pattern of deception and manipulation of international forums,” it added.

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