Judgment No. 3287
Decision
1. WIPO shall pay the complainant 6,000 Swiss francs in damages.
2. It shall also pay him 3,500 francs in costs.
3. The complaint is otherwise dismissed.
Summary
The complainant, who reported his suspicions that someone was unlwafully accessing his professional email account, impugned the decision to deny him access to the investigation report.
Judgment keywords
Keywords
complaint allowed; moral injury; delay; inquiry; compensation; right; investigation
Considerations 15 and 16
Extract:
"The complainant cited one judgement of the United Nations Administrative Tribunal to support a request for the provision of documents in a broadly analogous situation [...]. However the complainant cited no judgment of the Tribunal or another international administrative tribunal that has held, in the face of a provision such as paragraph 10, that an organisation must or even should make available a report containing confidential information gathered from various sources during an investigation to a person who requested it even if that person is centrally involved in the investigation. Paragraphs 9 and 10 are fundamental to maintaining a system of internal investigation that is likely to be effective and reveal to the Administration the true position surrounding any particular issue or matter which is the subject of internal audit. It is true that there is a general trend in the case law of the Tribunal towards the production rather than non-disclosure of documents in an Administration’s possession which may bear upon a staff member’s position within the organisation (see, for example, Judgment 1756, consideration 10(b)). [...]
[T]his case provides an example of where a specific provision effectively denying disclosure for the purposes of promoting confidential communications with an internal auditor should be maintained fully and given effect. [...] The complainant had no right to be provided with a copy of the IAOD report and accordingly there was no relevant delay for which he may be entitled to damages."
Keywords
confidential evidence; disclosure of evidence; applicable law; refusal
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