News update as of 13 January 2016

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)/ An employer can monitor employee Messenger communications. Article No. 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (Council of Europe) guarantees the right for all to have their privacy respected including their private communications. According to ECHR jurisprudence this article protects telephone communications occurring at businesses premises, emails sent from personal email accounts, and intranet website searches, once the employee can reasonably expect this activity to be monitored. In this case the judges lifted the provision over Messenger communication since the account set up had been at the request of the employer and was destined for professional use. Furthermore the company’s internal regulations explicitly banned the use of company resources for personal use. Given this background the ECHR deemed that it was not “unreasonable that an employer would want to verify that employees were completing their professional tasks during working hours.” The monitoring was carried out in a limited and proportionate fashion (other elements on the employee’s computer had not been checked) and that since the ensuing redundancy was on the grounds of the employee using work related tools for personal use and not related to the content of any of the private communications,…