The Impact of the ECHR on Employee’s Privacy Protection

Abstract

This article explores the impact of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) on the employee’s privacy protection. The cases where the States in response to European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgments adopted changes into their national labour law are considered as direct impact of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), while the mechanisms elaborated by the ECtHR for the adjudication of cases involving employee’s privacy as well as the set of positive obligations deduced from Article 8 are examined as the sources of indirect impact. We argue that the Court’s approach to the matters of employee’s testing and surveillance are applicable for the estimation of new challenges to privacy such as keylogging, screenshotting, geolocation and polygraph testing. This research permits us to affirm that Article 8 of the ECHR has great potential in the field of employment law.