Judge Syed Mansoor Ali Shah has declared sexual harassment in the workplace “less about sexual desire and more about control and domination” in a recent judgment of the Supreme Court.
The sentence, dated February 12, was issued in a petition filed against a 2023 order by the Superior Court of Lahore (LHC) in a case of sexual harassment.
The verdict was issued by a statement presented by Muhammad Din, who challenged his mandatory retirement for accusations of harassment for Sidra Zafar, a doctor.
The retirement had been ordered by the people of Punjab in March 2020 and confirmed by the governor of Punjab in August 2020, as well as later by the LHC in its order of March 30, 2023, since they heard the subsequent pleas presented By DIN.
Judge Shah dismissed the request against the LHC ruling stating: “[The] The contentions raised by the wise lawyer for the petitioner have been responded convincingly in the contested trial.
“No jurisdictional error, illegality or procedural irregularity has been pointed out in the contested trial … The contested judgment does not guarantee any interference.”
He observed: “When the women’s authority is perceived as illegitimate or easily undermining, colleagues, customers and even subordinates can use harassment as an ‘equalizer’ to reaffirm the dynamics of traditional power.
This reinforces the notion that harassment in the workplace is less about sexual desire and more about control and domination, serving as a tool to monitor and punish women who interrupt spaces dominated by men. “
In his opinion, Judge Shah stressed that sexual harassment in the workplace remained a critical issue in the country.
He said: “At the beginning, it is imperative to recognize that harassment in the workplace remains a pressing global problem, which affects millions of workers in several sectors.”
“Women have a little more probability than men to have faced harassment about their careers.”
His judgment also cited a feminist legal scholar Catherine Mackinnon, who described harassment as “not as individual misconduct but as systemic discrimination based on sex that reinforces gender hierarchies in the workplace.”
In addition, he said: “However, gender -based harassment is not only about the hierarchy, but it is fundamentally who is perceived as the right to exercise authority.
“Therefore, although sexual harassment is mainly understood as a behavior based on power, individuals at any level of hierarchy can perpetrate harassment, particularly when they support gender or social reinforcements.”
Zafar had filed a complaint against the DIN petitioner for alleged harassment and misconduct to the Punjab people in 2019.
The respondent had detailed how she underwent “abuse, verbal assaults and characters murder” by its driver who dedicated himself to “inappropriate behavior, using an indecent language and behaving in a unusual way with female patients and spreading malicious rumors about it.”
Judge Shah’s verdict said Zafar lacked the “authority to eliminate the petitioner from his position” despite many requests to the department to transfer the petitioner.
The people of the town of Punjab had ruled that the actions of the petitioner constituted harassment and imposed a mandatory retirement penalty for DIN.
The petitioner had sought representation before the governor of Punjab who was dismissed in the contested order of 2020. Later, DIN invoked the constitutional jurisdiction of the LHC presenting a request for a court order against the contested order, which was also dismissed in 2023.
