Hong Kong equality watchdog wants laws tightened to provide more protection for victims of sexual harassment
- Omissions in Sex Discrimination Ordinance leave victims of ‘minor harassment’ with no avenue to seek redress
- Political changes have affected some rights groups, but do not affect Equal Opportunities Commission’s work, says chief
Hong Kong’s equality watchdog is pressing on with proposals to plug loopholes in the city’s sexual harassment law, with its head shrugging off talk that recent political changes have affected its efforts to increase protections for the vulnerable.
Chu said that one example meant that the law’s wording only applied to cases of “a student of an educational establishment” harassing “a woman … who is a student of the establishment”, and could not cover complaints involving students from different schools.
He added that when it came to cases involving residents of subdivided flats – where as many as a dozen or more poor people share the same premises – the law only covered complaints of harassment between a tenant and landlord, but not between occupants.
Such omissions in the law meant that victims of relatively minor kinds of harassment had no means of seeking redress, such as compensation or even an apology, Chu said.
More severe cases, such as indecent assault and rape, were dealt with by criminal law.
