The Superior Court of Justice in Murcia of March 29, 2017 revoked another judgment of the Social Court of First Instance that granted the worker the amount of 165,000 Euros as a compensation for dismissal. The Superior Court of Justice saw a just cause and declared fair dismissal of an employee because of forwarding emails from the company account to his private email.
The sentence stated “there is no doubt that the actor incurred a clear abuse of trust and disloyalty when forwarding emails sent to the company, in addition, to violate the ban on using the means of the company fraudulently” because by the internal regulations of use of electronic means that the company had written and distributed among its own employees, expressly forbade the forwarding of messages and corporate documents to the employee’s personal accounts, family or friends and prevented the configuration of the corporate email account to forward the messages received to his private email private.
Our office advise on labour matters through the elaboration of internal protocols in order to clarify the rights and obligations of workers and the relationship between employer and worker so that they can be used as evidence in court.
This judgment of March 2017 of the Superior Court of Justice of Murcia is now relevant because the Human Rights Court in Strasbourg on Tuesday granted amicus to a Romanian engineer, Bogdan Bărbulescu, who was fired in August 2007 for “using computers, photocopiers, telexes, telexes or faxes for personal purposes” ratifying that companies can review the content of their workers’ communications during business hours, if they are done through company equipment, with the nuance that this should be noted before.
This is a crucial judgment to determine the limits of privacy in the workplace, since it comes from the highest European judicial body in litigation on civil liberties, whose jurisprudence is followed by the national courts.