Europe rights court backs employee fired over private messages

STRASBOURG: Europe’s top rights court on Tuesday restricted the ability of employers to snoop on the private messages of their employees, in a landmark ruling with wide ramifications for privacy in the workplace.

The highest body of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled in favor of a 38-year-old Romanian man who claimed his rights had been violated when he was sacked in 2007 for sending private chat messages in the office.

Bogdan Mihai Barbulescu has fought a ten-year legal battle through Romanian and European courts, claiming his privacy had been infringed when his employer accessed intimate exchanges with his fiancee and brother.

In a first ruling in January last year, the ECHR found that the snooping was allowed because employers were justified in wanting to verify “that employees were completing their professional tasks during working hours.”

But in a review, the 17 most senior judges at the Strasbourgbased court in France found Tuesday that Romanian courts “had not adequately protected Mr. Barbulescu’s right to respect for his private life and correspondence.”

In a written judgment, backed by 11 votes to six, they found that previous court rulings had “failed to strike a fair balance between the interests at stake,” namely the company’s right to check on employees and employees’ right to privacy.

The judges also found that “an employer’s instructions could not reduce private social life in the workplace to zero,” meaning that some use of the Internet at work for personal reasons was justified.

The ruling will become law in the 47 countries that have ratified the European Convention on Human Rights, meaning some members will have to adjust their national legislation.

The case revolved around messages sent in 2007 by Barbulescu over the Yahoo messenging platform, which the software engineer was required to use by his bosses to liaise with clients.

He was sacked after his employer accused him of using company resources for personal reasons, which violated company policy, and produced 45 pages of his private messages to his fiancee and brother as proof.

Barbulescu argued that his employer had invaded his right to privacy by using spyware to access the chat material which included details about his private life.

In their judgment on the court’s website, the ECHR judges said Tuesday that it was unclear whether Barbulescu had been warned about the monitoring or the risk of the messages being read without his authorization.