A woman who lost an €800,000 award in a civil court case has filed a court case claiming breach of human rights.

In 1993, Victoria Cassar sued the Port Workers Board after she was not allowed to fill her father's port worker job when he retired in 1992 on grounds that she was a woman, only to learn that her uncle had been accepted to fill her father's position in her stead.

She claimed to have suffered a substantial loss of earnings and demanded damages.

In 2000, the First Hall of the Civil Court in its Constitutional jurisdiction ordered the board to allow her to register herself as being eligible to be a port worker from 1992. A year later, the Constitutional Court confirmed the judgment. A civil case for the liquidation of damages was filed and in 2012 and Ms Cassar was awarded €799,168.

But the chairman of the Port Workers Board appealed and the Court of Appeal overturned the award, concluding that the Port Workers Board was not responsible for the damages suffered.

In an application filed by lawyer Tonio Azzopardi, Ms Cassar is arguing that the appeal judgment was incompatible with that of the Constitutional Court and violated her constitutional right to freedom from discrimination and constituted degrading treatment.

The Court of Appeal was obliged to decide the issue according to the decision of the Constitutional Court, she insisted.

The court application called on the court to declare that Ms Cassar had suffered a breach of her fundamental human rights, to order that she be given her father's licence with effect from 1992, revoke the May 2017 judgment of the Court of Appeal and order the payment of liquidated damage together with consequential damages and moral damages.

The demand was filed together with a judicial protest filed by Ms Cassar's son Carlo, who argued that he had a legitimate expectation to inherit the port worker licence from his mother and was holding the Minister for Transport, Transport Malta and the Port Workers Board responsible for damages.