Watchdog

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ordered Pakistan not to execute an Indian naval officer convicted of espionage and terrorism.

The UN court in The Hague said on May 18 that Pakistan should not carry out the death penalty against Kulbhushan Jadhav, pending the outcome of a case filed by India over the matter.

Court President Ronny Abraham said the court decided unanimously to order Pakistan to "take all measures at its disposal to ensure that Mr. Jadhav is not executed."

India lodged a case against Pakistan last week, alleging that Islamabad violated the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by denying Jadhav's right to consular assistance following his arrest last year.

With the case expected to take months or years to resolve, New Delhi also appealed for the court to impose emergency measures to suspend Jadhav's execution until the legal battle has concluded.

The ICJ, also known as the World Court, was set up in 1945 to rule on disputes between states in accordance with international law. Its rulings are binding.

"The ICJ order has come as a huge relief to the family of Kulbhushan Jadhav and people of India," the country’s external affairs minister, Sushma Swaraj, wrote on a Twitter post.

Meanwhile, Pakistan's ambassador to the Netherlands sought to play down the significance of the court's order, saying, "It's a very basic thing which the court has done, given its ruling on a provisional measure which is basically a procedural process and I think that is about it."

The ICJ "has said nothing on the merits or the maintainability of the case," Ambassador Moazzam Ahmad Khan added.

The case has further strained tense relations between the nuclear-armed neighbors.

Pakistan says Jadhav,46, was arrested in March 2016 in the southwestern province of Balochistan, which has been hit by a separatist insurgency that Islamabad accuses India of backing.

New Delhi denies Jadhav was a spy and claims he was kidnapped from Iran.

In an emergency ICJ hearing on May 15, Indian representatives said Jadhav’s death sentence last month followed an "unjust" trial in a Pakistani military court and that Islamabad failed to respond to New Delhi’s demands for information about the case.

But Pakistan’s representatives told the tribunal that Jadhav "confessed to having been sent by India to wage terror on the innocent civilians and infrastructure of Pakistan."

With reporting by AP and Reuters

The Canadian government will back imposing sanctions on officials from Russia and other nations deemed guilty of human rights violations, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland announced on May 17.

Freeland told parliament that Canada’s Liberal government supports draft legislation to expand the range of punitive measures that can be taken against foreign officials, including seizing and freezing assets.

The bill is inspired by the case of Russian whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky, an anticorruption lawyer who died in 2009 after a year in a Russian jail. Magnitsky was imprisoned after accusing officials of a $230 million tax fraud.

"I truly believe this is the direction the world is going, and I think it will send a strong message," Freeland said. “In Canada and around the world, the issue of human rights sanctions and in particular the case of Sergei Magnitsky have drawn strong interest, and rightly so.”

Freeland's announcement came one month after the House of Commons' Foreign Affairs Committee encouraged the Liberal government to broaden Canadian sanctions legislation to include human rights abusers. The previous Conservative government was wary of the move.

The proposed Sergei Magnitsky Act has widespread backing in parliament and is considered likely to become law.

Based on the Russian reaction to other nations that passed similar legislation, it’s likely that the legislation would further cool relations between Canada and Russia.

The Obama administration and the U.S. Congress enacted their Magnitsky Act in 2012, prompting Russian President Vladimir Putin to respond with a law that banned American citizens from adopting Russian children.

Tensions between Ottawa and the Kremlin have risen since Freeland, an outspoken critic of repression in Russia, took office. She is one of the Western officials placed on Russia's sanctions list in 2014 after Western sanctions were imposed on Russia for its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

During Freeland's previous career as a journalist, she called Putin a "really dangerous" authoritarian.

Britain last month passed legislation inspired by Magnitsky's death that would allow authorities to freeze the assets of alleged human rights violators.

The Kremlin's own human rights council has said there was evidence suggesting Magnitsky was beaten to death in jail. But Putin has dismissed allegations of foul play, saying Magnitsky died of heart failure.

With reporting by Reuters, Global News, Globe and Mail, and Canadian Press