The Higher Center for Scientific Research (CSIC) reaffirms its employees in its management of the case of Mari Carmen Fernández, the woman who worked as a waitress on one of its ships and who disappeared just a year ago on the high seas after activating the protocol against sexual harassment due to the events she had suffered at the hands of a colleague. It does so in an internal note to which elDiario.es had access and which it sent to its workers after the broadcast this Sunday of the program Salvados on the subject. The statement insists that “the content of the order of dismissal” issued in court “implied that the CSIC had to abandon the harassment case.”
At the time, the agency investigated the case following Mari Carmen’s complaint and took it to court, where it was falsely closed, which paralyzed the employment file forever. Later, when she returned to work after taking a leave of absence due to depression, she found her harasser, boarded the ship García del Cid to begin a mission and never returned. Her disappearance was investigated, but was classified as a suicide. Her lawyer, the unions and the family believe that more could have been done: both judicially and by the CSIC itself.
The institution, for its part, assures that the woman and her family “have received different types of psychosocial support during this long process that began in 2019,” it indicates in the internal note, in which it states that it received “with great concern and regret the news of Mari Carmen’s disappearance: “She is still missing and there are not enough words to describe the grief and pain we feel for this reason,” it explains to its employees.
The CSIC also justifies in the text its refusal to make public statements on the case, beyond communicating with certain media “to request the rectification of certain information.” This is a “decision,” he says, taken when he considered it “prudent to await the conclusions of the investigation conducted by the state security forces and bodies and the judicial resolutions” of a case that he describes as “particularly complex.”
He also gives another explanation: “it must preserve the privacy of our colleague and his family and ensure compliance with the legal obligation of confidentiality,” which, according to him, “limits the detail of the information” that the institution was able to disclose. give publicly,” says the statement, which reaffirms that the organization “collaborated with the competent authorities and responded to parliamentary questions” on the case.
12 cases in five years
The institution begins the internal note by describing as “inadmissible” the harassment against “any of the 15,000 people who work in the institution” and ensuring that sexual harassment against women “is a form of violence and discrimination that threatens their dignity, health and rights. Furthermore, it defends that in this type of case, “it has worked and continues to do so to implement the measures” that it details at the end of the statement.
In this section, it explains that it has had protocols against sexual harassment since 2013 and that the last one was updated in April 2024, including “ten fundamental improvements” on which “all staff” received information. The CSIC informs its workers that it has activated the protocol for complaints of this type on 12 occasions in the last five years and up to December 2023, without specifying what happened to them.
Among the latest additions to the protocol are the obligation to report possible situations of harassment by middle managers and equality committees “to avoid possible under-reporting” of cases, the creation of a unit to promote a “healthy and safe” environment and two that specifically concern the case of Mari Carmen: “the possibility of continuing the administrative route in the investigation and sanction even if the judicial route is exhausted” – which is precisely what the CSIC claims to have been unable to do in this case – and the incorporation of “specific measures” in places that involve long coexistence such as boats.
Furthermore, in July 2024, the organization “promoted” a protocol with other public institutions with the aim of “collaborating” and constituting an “early warning” mechanism to be able to intervene in cases of harassment that occurred on ships that do not belong to the CSIC or do not affect its personnel “because the CSIC has recently had news” of some of these situations “that have appeared in the media.”
