Company cannot claim harassment in civil suit, court rules in AXA case

SINGAPORE — If a disgruntled customer emails and calls a company repeatedly and uses vulgar and threatening language towards the employees, can a court rule that he is harassing them and order him to stop?

A High Court judge does not think so, saying that laws presently do not provide for civil remedies against “socially and morally indefensible” conduct.

Justice Choo Han Teck pointed this out in dismissing AXA Insurance Singapore’s bid to stop a customer from “harassing, alarming, and distressing” its employees for good, in a judgment that was released yesterday.

Mr Chandran Natesan had purportedly sent 19 emails and made seven phone calls over nine working days to several of his insurer’s employees while making a claim for an accident involving his motorcycle on June 8. The company alleged that he used vulgar and threatening language “on a number of these occasions”.

Arguing that Mr Chandran’s action amounted to a tort of nuisance, AXA on Aug 1 sought to get the court to order him to stop.

Dismissing the application, Justice Choo noted that laws now only make “harassment” a criminal offence — in the Miscellaneous Offences (Public Order and Nuisance) Act — but Parliament has not defined what constitutes “harassment” in civil suits.

To the plaintiff, Mr Chandran was deemed to be harassing its workers, but “from the point of the defendant, he was pressing for his rights as a policy-holder”, the judge pointed out.

“It is up to the legislature to determine whether the law should be used to govern annoyance caused by means of letters, emails, and telephone messages and whether the present public order law ought to be expanded to allow a claim for civil remedies,” he said.

Noting that AXA’s claims against Mr Chandran were not established in court — he did not attend the hearing — Justice Choo asked: “If the defendant in this case did not use abusive language, would (his) conduct still be regarded as harassment? Would a loosely recognised law of harassment be used to oppress others and avoid one’s legal obligations?”

He added: “By allowing litigants to sue when they feel harassed when there is no direct contact nor proof of damage, the court may be creating a blockbuster tort which will have unpredictable consequences, some of which may not be desirable.”

Justice Choo also noted that civil action in harassment and laws relating to privacy — for which there have been recent calls — are “complex and connected and must be considered together”.

Lawyers TODAY spoke to said lawsuits against harassment are rare and agreed that a clear definition on what constitutes harassment was needed.

Said Mr Choo Zheng Xi, a lawyer at Peter Low LLC: “You do not want to end up in a situation where an institutional plaintiff tends to silence an individual complainant who might be particularly persistent in his or her complaints. You do not want a situation in the civil courts where the better-resourced party is able to silence the less well-resourced. So a balance needs to be struck.”