European Court of Human Rights · 5 September 2017
Bărbulescu v Romania
In plain English
A sales engineer was dismissed after his employer read his Yahoo Messenger chats, including private ones. The Grand Chamber found a violation because the national courts did not check whether he had been warned in advance and whether the monitoring was justified and limited.
What the court ruled
the domestic courts failed to determine, in particular, whether the applicant had received prior notice from his employer of the possibility that his communications on Yahoo Messenger might be monitored …
the Court considers that the domestic authorities did not afford adequate protection of the applicant's right to respect for his private life and correspondence and that they consequently failed to strike a fair balance between the interests at stake.
Related
The official text is quoted word for word from the English version of the source named under it; only the version published in the court’s own records is authoritative. The plain-English line is Fino’s own summary, not legal advice.