The Bombay High Court at Goa held that s.14 of the POSH Act penalises a woman (or a person filing on her behalf) for a false and malicious complaint, but provides no punishment for a third party who instigates one. It also held that an Internal Committee cannot record a named instigator as an 'unknown' source where his identity is disclosed in the retraction letter that closed the complaint.
The Supreme Court held that an Internal Complaints Committee at the aggrieved woman's own workplace has jurisdiction under the POSH Act even where the respondent is employed in a different department or organisation. The phrase 'where the respondent is an employee' in Section 11 is a conditional trigger for service rules, not a jurisdictional limit.
On 12 May 2023, a two-judge Bench of Bopanna and Hima Kohli JJ. set aside the Goa University disciplinary inquiry against its former vice-chancellor for procedural defects in the Internal Complaints Committee and, more consequentially, issued nationwide directions to State Legal Services Authorities, the National Judicial Academy and statutory regulators for ICC capacity-building, compliance audits and training. A digest of the holding, the structural reasons the 2013 POSH Act needed a second judicial push ten years on, and the compliance architecture the directions installed.