India’s foreign ministry on Thursday reiterated that the Court of Arbitration has “no existence in the eye of law,” stating that it lacks any legal authority to make pronouncements about the 1960 water-sharing pact between India and Pakistan.

The ministry described the tribunal as “illegally constituted” and said New Delhi has never recognized its legitimacy. The statement notably rejected the tribunal’s recent Supplemental Award on Competence, handed down in June. The government maintained that after a militant attack in Kashmir in April, India exercised its rights as a sovereign nation to hold the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance until Pakistan “credibly and irrevocably abjures” support for cross-border terrorism.

The Court of Arbitration was empaneled under the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 in order to resolve disputes arising from India and Pakistan’s shared use of water from the Indus River system. The river system springs from the Tibetan Plateau and flows through India into Pakistan.

The current court tribunal was convened under Article IX and Annexure G of the Indus Waters Treaty after Pakistan initiated arbitration in 2016. In April, India suspended recognition of the treaty to pressure Pakistan into combating reported terrorist activity along the nations’ border.

In June, the adjudicative body issued its unanimous Supplemental Award on Competence, concluding that India’s suspension of the treaty did not remove the tribunal’s jurisdiction. The court held that events occurring after arbitration had begun cannot defeat an established tribunal’s competence and stated they remained bound to conduct the proceedings in a timely, efficient, and fair manner.

New Delhi’s response, laid out in a Ministry of External Affairs statement, framed the matter differently. It argued that India has “never recognised the existence in law” of this tribunal and that any decisions it issues are “illegal and per se void.”

The dispute deepened following the tribunal’s Award on Issues of General Interpretation in August, which set out how the treaty’s technical and interpretive rules apply to run-of-river hydroelectric projects on the western rivers. The adjudicative body reaffirmed that its rulings are “final and binding” and stressed that India’s refusal to participate did not remove its competence to decide.

Analysts note that India cites a procedural defect in the tribunal’s creation and its sovereign decision to suspend the treaty, while Pakistan and the tribunal rely on the treaty’s dispute-settlement provisions and established practice that unilateral acts after proceedings start do not negate jurisdiction. According to a legal and regional stability analysis, this standoff threatens a pact long viewed as a model of cooperation, with serious implications for South Asian water security and the role of third-party dispute resolution.

Without a negotiated settlement, the case will likely continue as a mix of legal contestation and political maneuvering, testing whether international rulings can hold sway without the internal political will to enforce them.