Judgment No. 4756
Decision
The complaint is dismissed.
Summary
The complainant challenges the decision not to conduct an investigation into his allegation of breach of confidentiality and to deny his request for compensation.
Judgment keywords
Keywords
disclosure of evidence; investigation; complaint dismissed; confidentiality
Consideration 8
Extract:
The Tribunal has addressed the issue of the IAEA’s duty to maintain the confidentiality of a staff member’s personnel information, as stated in Judgment 4012, consideration 3:
“[T]he filing of confidential personnel information in a publicly accessible email folder constituted a breach of the Organization’s duty to maintain the confidentiality of a staff member’s personnel information. The complainant, however, did not suffer any damage because of this breach. Leaving aside the fact that the complainant did not submit any evidence whatsoever let alone evidence establishing damage to his reputation or otherwise [...] As soon as the emails were located, they were immediately removed. Taking this into account, there will be no award of moral damages for the breach.”
The filing of the letter of 11 November 2016, which contained confidential information, in electronic folders accessible to all staff members constituted a breach of the organization’s duty to maintain the confidentiality of a staff member’s personnel information. In the present case, however, the Director, Division of Human Resources (MTHR) took immediate steps to remedy the design flaw in the ERMS thereby preventing the document from being accessible. The IAEA’s Livelink platform was upgraded to eliminate the risk of such a flaw occurring in the future. In these circumstances, the complainant has not submitted evidence establishing damage to his reputation or other injury arising out of the temporary accessibility of the above-mentioned letter. As the complainant has not presented any persuasive evidence in support of his claim for damages, this request must be rejected.
Reference(s)
ILOAT Judgment(s): 4012
Keywords
moral damages; confidentiality
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