ISLAMABAD – Alliance Against Sexual Harassment (AASHA) – a coalition of dozen civil society organisations working to eliminate sexual harassment and promoting women’s rights – urged the provincial governments to swiftly legislate to protect women against sexual harassment on Saturday.
AASHA organised a seminar to advocate the need of implementation of the law against women’s sexual harassment, in Islamabad. Speakers at the seminar called upon the provincial chief ministers to immediately appoint ombudsmen to hear and decide women’s complains against their sexual harassment at workplace.
They also asked the chief ministers to issue directives to all ministries, divisions and departments to implement the women protection law that would give a hope to long-struggling women of the country.
Mehergarh, an AASHA member organisation, Director Maleeha Hussain said the AASHA was running six legal aid centres in the country to provide free legal aid to women, adding that the centres in Islamabad, Peshawar , Lahore , Multan, Karachi and Hyderabad have one lawyer and one counsellor each.
Even though Pakistan has a law against sexual harassment in the workplace, it will not be effective if women employees do not have access to competent and honest attorneys and women's organisations that are willing to take up their cases. Pakistan's Alliance Against Sexual Harassment [AASHA] lists a large multinational pharmaceutical company SmithKline Beecham Pakistan, as a "progressive employer" even though the company fired me for filing a sexual harassment complaint against my supervisor. I informed AASHA about it but the organisation neither replied to me nor removed the company's name from its list of "progressive employers." So much for mobilising organisations for victims of sexual harassment. Asma Siddiqi
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