Judgment No. 4587
Decision
1. The South Centre shall pay the complainant an additional amount of 5,000 United States dollars in moral damages.
2. It shall also pay the complainant 8,000 United States dollars in costs.
3. All other claims are dismissed.
Summary
The complainant challenges the non-renewal of her fixed-term appointment.
Judgment keywords
Keywords
complaint allowed; fixed-term; reorganisation; non-renewal of contract
Consideration 2
Extract:
The organization sought the joinder of this complaint with another complaint filed on the same day by another translator. However, as each concerns the non-renewal of fixed-term appointments of individual employees, it is appropriate to address each complaint separately. This is so, even though there is a considerable overlap of the analysis in each judgment. The request for joinder is therefore rejected.
Keywords
joinder
Consideration 5
Extract:
[O]ne matter should be noted. As is apparent from the [applicable] provisions […], the Appellate Body’s decisions are final. Thus, unlike the appellate framework in many international organizations, the final decision on an appeal does not rest with the Executive Head of the organization. In its pleas, the South Centre challenges some of the reasoning and conclusions of the Appellate Body.
Given that this body is invested under the South Centre’s Regulations with the power to make a final decision binding on the organization, it may be doubted that the South Centre is able to impeach its decision-making in the Tribunal. However, this issue was not raised in the pleas and nothing more needs to be said in this judgment.
Keywords
final decision; estoppel
Consideration 12
Extract:
The case law of the Tribunal establishes that, as a general rule, a staff member must have access to all evidence on which the authority bases (or intends to base) its decision against her or him. Under normal circumstances, such evidence cannot be withheld on grounds of confidentiality (see, for example, Judgment 2700, consideration 6; see also, on the issue of breach of due process, Judgment 4412, consideration 14).
Reference(s)
ILOAT Judgment(s): 2700, 4412
Keywords
disclosure of evidence
Consideration 14
Extract:
Although it is true that the Staff Regulations do not provide for a specific timeframe within which the process in front of that body should be completed, the Tribunal has consistently held that international organizations have a duty to ensure that internal appeals are conducted with due diligence (see, for example, Judgment 4173, consideration 12, and the case law cited therein). Given that the matter at hand involved the termination, from the complainant’s standpoint, of a fixed-term contract renewed regularly for many years, the Tribunal finds that the whole delay in the internal appeal process of the Appellate Body was excessive and unreasonable.
Reference(s)
ILOAT Judgment(s): 4173
Keywords
delay
Consideration 16
Extract:
With respect to the findings of the Appellate Body that there were valid, objective and substantiated reasons for discontinuing in-house translation and thus ultimately not renewing the contract of the complainant, notwithstanding the latter’s understandable disagreement, it remains that, based on the analysis conducted by the Administration and the costs evaluations made, there were justifications for the outsourcing of translation services that, in fact, permitted significant savings while reducing translation times as well as increasing the number of translated languages. This is supported by the written submissions filed as well as by the annexes. In Judgment 3376, at consideration 2, the Tribunal indicated that “[t]he outsourcing of certain services, that is to say the use by an organisation of external contractors to perform tasks that it feels unable to assign to officials hired under its staff regulations, forms part of the general employment policy that an organisation is free to pursue in accordance with its general interests. The Tribunal is not competent to review the advisability or merits of the adoption of such a measure in a specific field of activity”.
Reference(s)
ILOAT Judgment(s): 3376
Keywords
abolition of post; reorganisation; outsourcing
Considerations 19-20
Extract:
[I]t is worth recalling that the case law of the Tribunal has often reiterated that an employee on a fixed-term contract does not have a right to the renewal of the contract when it expires (see, for example, Judgments 4462, consideration 18, 3586, consideration 6, and 3448, consideration 7), and that the Tribunal’s scope of review is limited when an organization decides not to extend or renew a fixed-term appointment (see Judgment 3948, consideration 2, and the case law cited therein).
The claims of the complainant for the payment of termination indemnities, which rely on the provisions of Staff Regulation 9.1.2 that apply in situations of termination of an appointment as opposed to non-renewal of a fixed-term contract, must consequently be rejected.
Reference(s)
ILOAT Judgment(s): 3448, 3586, 3948, 4462
Keywords
fixed-term; terminal entitlements; non-renewal of contract
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