Islamabad, Pakistan – A court of arbitration in The Hague has ruled that India cannot unilaterally suspend the Indus Waters Treaty, rejecting every argument New Delhi has used to justify holding the six-decade-old water-sharing agreement “in abeyance” since April 2025.

In a unanimous decision issued on Monday, the five-member court found that the treaty “remains fully in force” and that India “must observe its obligations” under it, including those governing the design and operation of hydropower projects on rivers that flow into Pakistan.

The ruling is the first time an international court has ruled on whether India’s decision to place the treaty in abeyance is legally valid.

India announced the decision in April 2025, after a deadly attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir, saying it would suspend the treaty until Pakistan “credibly and irrevocably” ends support for cross-border terrorism. Islamabad denies accusations that it was behind the attack, in which 26 civilians were killed by gunmen who first tried to determine the religion of their victims.

India has rejected the jurisdiction of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) – an intergovernmental court outside the United Nations system whose mandate New Delhi has accepted in other cases – in the Indus Waters Treaty case brought by Pakistan to The Hague. India did not participate in any of the hearings that culminated in Monday’s ruling.

It was quick to reject the verdict, leaving Pakistan with a legal and diplomatic victory whose actual worth will now be tested.

Reactions in Islamabad and New Delhi

After India placed the treaty in abeyance in April 2025, Pakistan applied in March 2026 for the PCA to rule on the treaty’s status, arguing it could not order India to comply with an agreement that might no longer be in force.

The court invited India to take part, but India did not respond. Hearings went ahead at the Peace Palace in The Hague from April 26 to 28, 2026, with only Pakistan present.

The court examined every ground India has cited publicly: Sovereignty, Pakistan’s alleged unwillingness to renegotiate, cross-border terrorism, and changes such as demographic growth, clean-energy needs and climate change.

The court rejected all of them, finding that no rule of international law allows a state to unilaterally suspend a treaty on the grounds that it was a sovereign nation within its rights to walk away from a pact.

Pakistan’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar welcomed the ruling.

“Pakistan welcomes the unanimous Award of the Court of Arbitration today, which decisively rejects India’s unlawful attempt to place the Indus Waters Treaty ‘in abeyance’ and reaffirms that the Treaty remains fully in force and binding on both parties,” he said in a statement on X. “India must fully comply with its obligations under the Treaty and with the binding decisions of its dispute settlement mechanisms.”

India, for its part, rejected the ruling within hours.

In a statement, India’s Ministry of External Affairs called the court “illegally constituted”.

Abeyance, it said, “remains in force” until Pakistan “credibly and irrevocably” ends support for cross-border attacks, a charge Islamabad denies.

The legal path and its limits

Legal experts say the ruling strengthens Pakistan’s position, even if it offers no obvious way to force India’s hand.

“This is not merely declaratory,” Ahmer Bilal Soofi, an international law expert who also served as Pakistan’s caretaker federal law minister, told Al Jazeera. “It gives Pakistan a very categorical, clear legal basis to consider countermeasures under international law, whenever it chooses to do so.”

Sikander Ahmed Shah, professor of international law at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, agreed that India’s absence from the hearings does not weaken the outcome.

“India’s non-participation doesn’t make any difference. The court has established that it has jurisdiction, and India signed the treaty,” he told Al Jazeera. “This is a PCA judgement, and its value and precedent under international law carry real weight.”

Both, however, acknowledged that there is no formal enforcement mechanism comparable to a UN Security Council order.

Pakistani officials have already set out what compliance would look like in practice.

At an international seminar on the treaty in Islamabad on June 30, Pakistan’s Indus Waters commissioner, Syed Mehar Ali Shah, called for “an immediate Commission meeting, general and special tours and inspections”.

The Permanent Indus Commission, the joint body of Pakistani and Indian officials set up to run the treaty day-to-day, has not met since May 2022.

Pakistan says India has also stopped sharing routine river-flow data and blocked site inspections since 2023, both of which the treaty requires.

Dar made a similar case in Washington on August 28, calling on both countries to “resume and strengthen the process of technical dialogue, transparency, and data sharing”.

The deputy prime minister made the remarks virtually, addressing a separate seminar on the treaty hosted by Pakistan’s embassy in Washington, three days before Monday’s ruling.

Beyond that, Soofi said, Pakistan’s options narrow to diplomatic pressure exerted at international forums.

A different kind of warning

Since India’s unilateral decision to walk away from the Indus Waters pact, Pakistani officials and military leaders have increasingly described the dispute in existential terms.

Commissioner Shah, at the June 30 seminar, called flow predictability “part of the survival architecture of the state”.

Federal Minister for Climate Change Musadik Malik, at the same event, called the dispute “a crisis of justice”, not simply one of water or climate.

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party and a former foreign minister, told the same June 30 seminar that the dispute was “not a technical dispute … not a matter of paperwork, hydrology, or administrative abeyance. This is the weaponisation of water.”

He asked: “How can Pakistan be expected to sustain a ceasefire when India continues to pose an existential threat?”

A few weeks later, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif went further still.

Addressing the inauguration of a war memorial in Islamabad on August 13, flanked by the army, navy and air force chiefs, a day before Pakistan’s Independence Day, he declared, “every single drop of Pakistan’s water is our red line.”

He warned India would face “a crushing response with even greater force” than the May 2025 conflict if it moved against Pakistan’s water or sovereignty, according to the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan.

Hassan Abbas, an Islamabad-based hydrology and water resources expert, disagreed with the suggestion, however, that the breakdown of the pact for the moment posed an imminent threat to Pakistan.

“I don’t think there is an existential threat as such right now,” he told Al Jazeera. “The western rivers are protected by geography, not primarily by the treaty.”

India’s built storage capacity on the Chenab River is roughly 1 million acre-ft (405,000 hectare-ft), he noted, small next to Pakistan’s own seasonal irrigation needs.

“If they say they won’t let water flow, they will end up flooding themselves,” he said, since the Indian dams are run-of-river hydropower plants with little storage room.

“Once their dams are full, they have no option but to let water go,” Abbas added.

But he was also critical of Pakistan’s own water management.

Islamabad’s fixation on new mega-dams, he argued, ignores cheaper fixes. Raising irrigation efficiency could free up more water than new reservoirs will ever store, the water expert said.