Greenpeace India claims it ended employment of the rape and sexual harassment accused

Facing a fresh controversy, Greenpeace India on Tuesday claimed that it has "ended" the employment of two of its employees - one allegedly involved in cases of rape of a woman employee of the organisation and the other accused of several cases of sexual harassment.

The statement comes after one of its ex-employees wrote an article which was published on a web forum last week alleging rape and sexual harassment by colleagues at Greenpeace India.

"The staff members, who had previously submitted their resignations, were informed today that they must leave the organisation immediately and they would not be required to serve out their formal notice period," it said in a statement.

It claimed that Greenpeace India has also set up a "new" Internal Complaints Committee to address "previous failures" in its internal process and expresses its full commitment to ensuring that incidents of sexual harassment are never repeated within the organisation.

The NGO had yesterday tendered an unconditional apology for the way it handled the alleged sexual harassment case and said it is investigating the matter.

"We've taken a number of steps to try to improve the situation and will take further steps to make people feel safe from any kind of workplace harassment...our internal processes failed and we did not handle that complaint adequately and have admitted to it. We asked the colleague in question if we could re- investigate the matter, but she declined, citing our initial failures and her lack of confidence in our procedures," the statement said.