Ian Smith notes the recent newsworthy decisions from the employment courts
The most newsworthy case in the last month has to be Barbulescu v Romania (App 61496/08) where the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) held that an employer’s investigation into an employee’s private use of its e-mail system did not breach Art 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. It was widely reported in the press in fairly black and white terms as to the employer’s rights here but your humble author agrees very much with the points made by Chris Bryden and Michael Salter in their recent article that the decision is much more nuanced than that, being largely a question of fact and reasonable conduct in each case (see “Becoming anti-social (Pt 2)”, NLJ, 29 January 2016, p 10). In particular, it is worth pointing out the following factors present on the facts of that case:
(i) there was a clear contractual term outlawing any personal usage;
(ii) that policy was enforced—to the claimant’s knowledge, another employee
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