WITNESSES testified that a senior banker sketched private parts on the glass of his desk, asked a woman colleague to name them, and threatened to tear off her clothes if she wore a particular outfit again. Another officer made indecent remarks about her attire before colleagues. The ombudsperson found the charges proved; the Islamabad High Court agreed. On Sept 16, the Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) set that judgement aside without substantively engaging with this evidence or the high court’s careful appraisal of it.

Its central reason was a definition. Harassment under the 2010 workplace harassment law, it declared, “is only restricted to conduct which is sexual in nature”. Even by that narrow test, the conduct proved was plainly sexual. Before the high court, the officers never contended it fell short of harassment.

Why does the FCC confine harassment to sex? The Act’s title and preamble speak of ‘harassment’, not ‘sexual harassment’, and anchor it in the right to dignity. Nor does ‘sexual’ mean only the act of sex; it also means relating to the sexes, or to gender. The Supreme Court said so on review in Nadia Naz, through Justice Ayesha Malik; “sexually demeaning attitudes” means demeaning a person because of their sex. Yale’s Vicki Schultz has shown that much workplace harassment has nothing to do with desire; it belittles women and signals they do not belong. And the 2022 amendment, ignored altogether, covers gender discrimination “which may or may not be sexual in nature”.

Courts elsewhere agree.........

© Dawn