New Delhi, January 13
The Supreme Court today agreed to hear a PIL filed by a woman lawyer pleading for constitution of a committee headed by a woman to go into her complaint that she was sexually harassed by a sitting SC judge in May 2011 when she was interning with him.

A bench headed by Chief Justice P Sathasivam told senior counsel Harish Salve, who sought an urgent hearing on the petition the victim would be filing later in the day, that the matter would be taken up on January 15.

The victim said she had taken the PIL route as the women’s “right to work with dignity” was of “great public importance.” In her petition, she has named the judge, who now heads a national-level tribunal, the Secretary General of the SC and the Environment and Forests Ministry, the nodal ministry for the tribunal, as respondents.

She said the sexual harassment had filled her with “fear, anxiety and alarm” and turned the work environment “hostile and intimidating.” Though the internship was for 41 days (May 16-June 25, 2011), she had to abruptly quit within two weeks (on May 28) as she was afraid of her personal safety as the “incidents of sexual harassment were escalating.” She said she “has been living with the trauma of her experience since 2011.”

Explaining the reasons for the delay of two-and-a-half years in making the incident public, she said the SC did not have an internal mechanism for dealing with such matters in 2011 and that she was “afraid of the potential consequences of a complaint against a sitting SC Judge, both in my personal life and legal career.”

She said she was encouraged to approach the SC following prompt action taken by the apex court on a similar complaint against another former SC judge, AK Ganguly, by setting up a three-member panel of judges to go into the charges of sexual harassment. The victim, who did her law graduation from the West Bengal National University for Juridical Sciences (WBNUJS) from 2007-12, had sent a sworn affidavit narrating the harassment to the CJI on November 30, 2011, but the court’s Secretary General intimated her on December 13 that her complaint would not be entertained in the light of the December 5, 2013 full court resolution against admitting such pleas against retired judges.

At the time of her internship, she was working at the residence of the judge assisting him in organising a conference on environment as the Supreme Court was closed for summer vacation.

According to her complaint, the judge once touched her “lower back” while walking behind her, kissed her on the shoulder on another occasion and asked her as to whether she would be comfortable to travel with him and stay in hotel rooms.

The PIL pleaded for quashing the December 5 full court resolution, which was an administrative decision, contending that the refusal to entertain her complaint against a “sitting judge” was discriminatory.