Information Note on the Court’s case-law No. 96
April 2007
Copland v. the United Kingdom - 62617/00
Judgment 3.4.2007 [Section IV]
Article 8
Article 8-1
Respect for correspondence
Respect for private life
Monitoring of a State employee’s telephone, e-mail and internet usage without a statutory basis: violation
Facts: The applicant was employed by a college of further education, a statutory body administered by the State, as a personal assistant to the principal. From the end of 1995 she was required to work closely with the deputy principal. Her telephone, e-mail and internet usage were subjected to monitoring at the deputy principal’s instigation. According to the Government, this was in order to ascertain whether the applicant was making excessive use of college facilities for personal purposes. The monitoring of her telephone usage consisted of analysis of the college telephone bills showing telephone numbers called, the dates and times of the calls and their length and cost; the monitoring of her internet usage took the form of analysing the web sites visited, and the times, dates and durations of the visits; and the monitoring of her e-mails took the form of analysis of e-mail addresses and dates and times at which e-mails were sent. The college did not have a policy on monitoring at the material time. Nor there was any general right to privacy in English law although legislation was subsequently introduced providing for the regulation of the interception of communications and the circumstances in which employers could record or monitor employees’ communications without their consent.
Law: The College was a public body for whose acts the Government were responsible for Convention purposes. The question therefore related to the State’s negative obligation not to interfere with the applicant’s private life and correspondence.
Scope of private life – Telephone calls from business premises were prima facie covered by the notions of “private life” and “correspondence”. It followed logically that e-mails sent from work should be similarly protected, as should information derived from the monitoring of personal internet usage. The applicant had been given no warning that her calls would be liable to monitoring and therefore had a reasonable expectation as to the privacy of calls made from her work telephone. The same expectation ought to apply to her e-mail and internet usage.
Interference – The mere fact that the data may have been legitimately obtained by the college, in the form of telephone bills, was no bar to finding an interference. Nor was it relevant that it had not been disclosed to third parties or used against the applicant in disciplinary or other proceedings. The collection and storage of personal information relating to the applicant’s use of the telephone, e-mail and internet, without her knowledge, therefore amounted to an interference with her right to respect for her private life and correspondence.
“In accordance with the law” – In order to fulfil the requirement of foreseeability, the law had to be sufficiently clear in its terms to give individuals an adequate indication as to the circumstances in which and the conditions on which the authorities were empowered to resort to the measures concerned. The Government’s submission that the college was authorised under its statutory powers to do “anything necessary or expedient” for the purposes of providing higher and further education was unpersuasive. Moreover, it had not been submitted that any provisions existed at the relevant time, either in the general domestic law or the governing instruments of the college, regulating the circumstances in which employers could monitor the use of telephone, e-mail and the internet by employees. Thus, while leaving open the question whether the monitoring of an employee’s use of a telephone, e-mail or internet at the place of work might be considered “necessary in a democratic society” in certain situations in pursuit of a legitimate aim, the Court concluded that, in the absence of any domestic law regulating monitoring at the material time, the interference was not “in accordance with the law”.
Conclusion: violation (unanimously).
Article 41 – EUR 3,000 in respect of non-pecuniary damage.
© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights
This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.
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