In Barbulescu v Romania [2017] IRLR 1032 ECHR, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights held that the Romanian courts failed to afford adequate protection to the art.8 rights of an employee who sought to challenge his dismissal following a monitoring exercise by his employer.
In this Romanian case, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has held that monitoring the employee's private use of a business messaging account amounted to a breach of his right to private life and correspondence under art.8.
An employment tribunal has rejected the unfair dismissal claim of a long-serving employee with a clean disciplinary record who was dismissed over comments she made on Facebook about her employer.
This tribunal decision concerns a long-serving employee who was dismissed for making derogatory comments about his colleagues and his employer that he had posted on Twitter up to three years previously.
The Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) has considered the fairness of a dismissal for uploading obscene material onto a work cloud storage account, when the employee argued that password sharing was "widespread" in his workplace.
In this Romanian case, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) accepted that the employee's right to a private life had been affected when his employer accessed his Yahoo messages. However, the ECHR went on to hold that the employer's actions were justified in the circumstances and not in breach of art. 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights.
The Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) has held that procedural defects in an employee's dismissal for allegedly bullying a colleague who "unfriended" her on Facebook could be cured during the appeal stage.