Q: Is the right to respect the private life and correspondence of an employee breached if employers monitor employees’ personal communications at work?

A; No, subject to reasonableness/proportionality, according to the European Court of Human Rights in Barbulescu v Romania.

Mr Barbulescu was an engineer who used his business Yahoo Messenger account to send and receive personal messages with his fiancée and his brother, including messages about his health and sex life. This was in breach of his employment contract. His employer, discovering this accidentally, dismissed him. Mr Barbulescu argued that the Romanian courts should have excluded all evidence of his personal communications on the grounds it infringed his convention rights to privacy.

The European Court of Human Rights held that Article 8 (right to respect for private life and correspondence) was engaged, but that the Romanian courts were entitled to look at that evidence in deciding whether the dismissal was justified. The European Court was swayed by the fact that the Romanian court judgment did not reveal the precise content of the personal messages, but only the fact that they were personal messages. The Court recognised the need for employers to be able to verify that employees are completing professional tasks during working hours.