Judgment No. 1815
Decision
The complaint is dismissed.
Consideration 5
Extract:
The Board responsible for appraising the complainant's application for personal promotion had put forward a negative recommendation. "To ensure due process both in internal proceedings and before the Tribunal the staff member must get any items of information material to the outcome. And one such item is the names of the Advisory Body's members. Who they are may of course affect its reasoning and the weight its report carries, and so the staff member should be allowed at least to comment. That is why the Tribunal will acknowledge a complainant's right to know who sat in his case."
Keywords
advisory body; right to reply; organisation's duties; duty to inform; staff member's interest; promotion; personal promotion; advisory opinion; refusal; composition of the internal appeals body
Considerations 3 & 9
Extract:
Personal promotion is a means of letting a staff member have a grade higher than the one his post bears: see Judgment 1500 [...], under 4.
Circular 334 cited above used to say how staff might qualify and what the procedure was. Now there is Article 6.8.2 of the Staff Regulations as well.
[...]
The complainant had a good record and is understandably disappointed. But that affords no grounds for declaring unlawful the refusal to grant him an exceptional benefit for which the qualifications are stringent.
Reference(s)
ILOAT Judgment(s): 1500
Keywords
personal promotion
Consideration 8
Extract:
Only those who are in the same or like case may claim equal treatment and of course only comparison will tell whether they are.
If the complainant wants the barriers to be lowered to let everyone over he fails to show any justification for that in the rules. As circular 334 explains, the purpose of the ILO's scheme for personal promotion is to put up the pay of staff with an unusually fine record when the rules do not ordinarily allow it. There is nothing discriminatory about such exceptional treatment. It is indeed only reasonable to keep it exceptional by setting high standards and the quota. The rules make the process of selection objective and fair and again conduce to equality of treatment.
The complainant fails too to show discrimination. He cites no instance of the grant of personal promotion to anyone in the same or like case, particularly by the criterion of consistently above-average performance.
Keywords
equal treatment
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