Malaysia passes Anti-Sexual Harassment Bill with very minor amendments, despite widespread criticism

Malaysia’s Dewan Rakyat (Household of Reps) has handed the Anti-Sexual Harassment Monthly bill 2021, despite unaddressed worries of important shortcomings in the Bill.

The Invoice was in the beginning tabled for its initial reading in December 2021 (Study our former article: “Malaysia’s Anti-Sexual Harassment Invoice tabled in Parliament”). It was then withdrawn from a 2nd looking through earlier in 2022, with the government indicating that it would be substantially reviewed following strong comments acquired from various events. Regretably, the Invoice which was handed this week only had extremely insignificant amendments from the initial draft.

Owing to the limited revisions built from the initially draft, our summary of the Bill released in December 2021 is nonetheless typically precise: https://themalaysianlawyer.com/2021/12/15/anti-sexual-harassment-monthly bill/

These are the materials changes in the current version of the Monthly bill:

1. A new Clause 7(3) is provided, introducing a limitation period for sexual harassment complaints: “A criticism referred to the Tribunal under this Act is issue to the Limitation Act 1953.”
2. Although the initial variation supplied that parties at the listening to of a sexual harassment criticism simply cannot be represented by an advocate and solicitor, this has been revised [at Clause 13(2)] to supply that authorized representation will be allowed if “in the belief of the Tribunal, the issue in dilemma requires complex issues of law”. The revisions also supply that if just one social gathering is authorized to represented by an advocate and solicitor, then the other social gathering will also be so entitled.

With these really restricted variations, it appears that the issues lifted by various rights organisations who had hoped for “a meticulous assessment of the Bill” have been left unheard. Time will convey to whether or not the new extended-awaited regulation will be in depth sufficient to guard the legal rights and wellbeing of sexual harassment victims.

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