A tribunal in The Hague ruled that India cannot unilaterally suspend the Indus Waters Treaty, rejecting all of New Delhi’s arguments in favor of “suspending” the 60-year-old water-sharing agreement from April 2025.
In a unanimous decision published on Monday, the five-member arbitral tribunal found that the treaty “remains fully in force” and that India “must adhere to its obligations” under it, including those related to the design and operation of hydroelectric facilities on rivers flowing into Pakistan.
This is the first time an international court has examined the legal validity of India’s decision to suspend the treaty.
India announced the suspension of the agreement in April 2025 following a deadly attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir. New Delhi stated that the treaty would remain suspended until Pakistan “credibly and irreversibly” stops supporting cross-border terrorism. Islamabad denies any involvement in the attack, in which armed assailants killed 26 civilians, reportedly after attempting to determine their religion.
India does not recognize the jurisdiction of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) — an intergovernmental court outside the UN system — although New Delhi has accepted its authority in other cases. In this case, which Pakistan brought to The Hague, India did not participate in any of the hearings that concluded with Monday’s ruling.
Reaction to the ruling and its legal implications
After India suspended the treaty in April 2025, Pakistan filed a case with the PCA in March 2026 to determine the agreement’s status. Islamabad argued that it could not demand India’s compliance if the treaty was no longer in force.
The court invited India to participate in the proceedings, but New Delhi did not respond. Hearings took place at the Peace Palace in The Hague from April 26 to 28, 2026, with only Pakistan present.
The tribunal examined all the grounds India had publicly cited for suspending the treaty: sovereignty concerns, Pakistan’s alleged unwillingness to renegotiate the agreement, cross-border terrorism, and changes related to population growth, clean energy needs, and climate change.
The court rejected all these arguments, ruling that international law does not permit a state to unilaterally suspend a treaty solely on the basis that it is a sovereign state and considers itself entitled to abandon the agreement.
Ishaq Dar, Pakistan’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister, welcomed the court’s decision.
“Pakistan welcomes today’s unanimous decision by the Arbitral Tribunal, which decisively rejects India’s illegal attempt to suspend the Indus Waters Treaty and confirms that the Treaty remains fully in force and binding on both parties,” he said in a post on X.
“India must fully comply with its obligations under the Treaty and the binding decisions of its dispute resolution mechanisms,” Dar added.
India, for its part, rejected the ruling within hours. In a statement, India’s Ministry of External Affairs called the court “illegally constituted.” New Delhi said the suspension of the treaty “remains in effect” until Pakistan “credibly and irreversibly” stops supporting cross-border attacks — an accusation Islamabad denies.
Legal experts say the ruling strengthens Pakistan’s position, though it does not provide an obvious mechanism for enforcement.
Ahmer Bilal Soofi, an international law expert and former caretaker federal law minister of Pakistan, told Al Jazeera that the decision is “not just declaratory.” He said it gives Pakistan a clear legal basis to consider countermeasures under international law.
Sikander Ahmed Shah, a professor of international law at Lahore University of Management and Sciences, also noted that India’s absence from the hearings does not weaken the ruling.
“India’s non-participation does not matter. The court has established that it has jurisdiction, and India signed the treaty,” he told Al Jazeera. He added that the PCA’s decision carries significant legal weight and sets a precedent in international law.
At the same time, both experts acknowledged that there is no formal enforcement mechanism comparable to a UN Security Council resolution.
Pakistani officials have already outlined what treaty compliance could look like in practice. At an international seminar on the agreement in Islamabad on June 30, Pakistan’s Indus Waters Commissioner Syed Mehr Ali Shah called for “an immediate meeting of the Commission, general and special tours, and inspections.”
The Permanent Indus Commission — a joint body of Pakistani and Indian officials established to manage the treaty on a day-to-day basis — has not met since May 2022.
Pakistan also claims that India has stopped sharing regular river flow data and blocked inspections of facilities since 2023, despite the treaty requiring such actions.
Ishaq Dar made a similar statement in Washington on August 28, urging both countries to “resume and strengthen the process of technical dialogue, transparency, and data exchange.” The deputy prime minister spoke via video link at a separate seminar on the treaty organized by the Pakistani embassy in Washington.
According to Soofi, beyond this, Pakistan’s options essentially amount to diplomatic pressure through international forums.
‘Water weaponization’ and existential threat
Since India’s unilateral decision to suspend the Indus Waters Treaty, Pakistani officials and military leaders have increasingly framed the dispute as an existential threat.
Commissioner Shah, at the June 30 seminar, described the predictability of water flow as “part of the architecture of the state’s survival.” Federal Climate Change Minister Musadik Malik, at the same event, called the dispute a “crisis of justice” rather than merely a water or climate issue.
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party and former foreign minister, said the dispute “is not a technical dispute… it is not a matter of paperwork, hydrology, or administrative suspension. It is the weaponization of water.”
He also asked: “How can Pakistan be expected to honor a ceasefire when India continues to pose an existential threat?”
A few weeks later, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif went further. Speaking at the inauguration of a military memorial in Islamabad on August 13 in the presence of the army, navy, and air force chiefs, a day before Pakistan’s Independence Day, he declared: “Every drop of Pakistan’s water is our red line.”
According to state news agency Associated Press of Pakistan, Sharif warned that India would face a “devastating response with even greater force” than during the conflict in May 2025 if it acted against Pakistan’s water resources or sovereignty.
However, Hassan Abbas, a hydrology and water resources expert from Islamabad, disagreed with the assumption that the current situation poses an imminent existential threat to Pakistan.
“I don’t think there is an existential threat as such at the moment,” he told Al Jazeera. “The western rivers are protected by geography, not primarily by the treaty.”
Abbas noted that the volume of water India can store on the Chenab River is approximately 1 million acre-feet (405,000 hectare-feet), which is small compared to Pakistan’s seasonal irrigation needs.
