The UN Security Council (UNSC), which met behind-closed-doors Wednesday, discussed the grave situation in Indian occupied Kashmir for the second time in five months, with diplomats voicing concern over the escalating tensions between India and Pakistan.
"We had a meeting on Jammu and Kashmir," China's UN Ambassador Zhang Jun told reporters at UN Headquarters in New York.
The 15-member Council, he said, heard a briefing from the UN secretariat on the situation.
Pakistan and China had requested the Council to consider the situation in occupied Jammu and Kashmir.
The Chinese ambassador recalled that Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi had written letters to the Security Council drawing its attention to the situation in Kashmir, where the people are suffering under a repressive military lockdown with all communications links cutoff since August 5.
"The issue of India and Pakistan is always on the agenda of the Security Council," the Chinese ambassador said, while pointing out that "recently, we have also seen some tensions."
FM Qureshi is due to arrive in New York shortly.
Asked what China's position on the situation in Kashmir was, he said: "Our position is very clear."
China regards Kashmir as a territory disputed between India and Pakistan and supports the UN resolutions calling for the exercise by Kashmiri people of their right of self-determination through a UN-supervised plebiscite.
Diplomats said the Department of Peace Operations and the Department of Political and Peace-building Affairs briefed the Council on the situation in Kashmir, followed by a discussion on the situation among Council members in which all of them participated.
Asked whether Wednesday's meeting advanced anything, the Chinese ambassador said, "I am sure the meeting helped both parties to understand the risk of further escalation and will encourage them to approach to each other and to have dialogue and to seek means to seek solutions through dialogues. "That will be helpful."
In August last year, the Security Council had, for first time in over five decades, met to discuss the critical human rights situation in the occupied valley.
The meeting had come about after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked the constitutional autonomy of the valley in early August and imposed a military curfew and communications blackout in the area, sending in hundreds of thousands of Indian troops to quell protests.
Thousands of people, including the top political leadership of occupied Kashmir, as well as two former chief ministers and the mayor of capital Srinagar, were detained. International media also reported that the detainees had been tortured by the occupying Indian troops.
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