Centre for Environmental Rights – Advancing Environmental Rights in South Africa

The Centre for Environmental Rights stands with and supports victims of sexual harassment. We care about equality and justice, and evidence of sexual harassment in the public interest sector is painful and distressing.

The events of the past few weeks have reminded us how prevalent sexual harassment is – both in our society, and in the public interest sector. We are therefore in the process of developing, in collaboration with all our staff, a sexual harassment policy for our organisation. We are committed to doing this in a way that aims to ensure that the development, adoption, and implementation of this policy furthers our objective of ensuring that our organisation is aware of,  and responds effectively to sexual harassment of any kind.

While having a policy in place is important, we acknowledge that sexual harassment is part of a culture of gendered abuse of power and discrimination throughout our society. We are therefore working to challenge that culture in and outside our organisation, and instead foster a culture that is aligned with our values, and with the vision we have for our organisation: an organisation that will not tolerate sexual harassment, or any other abuses of power, forms of exclusion, discrimination, or silencing.