Judgment No. 4537
Decision
The complaint is dismissed.
Summary
The complainant challenges the decision to separate her from service on 31 July 2018, being the date on which she reached her retirement age according to the Staff Rules then in force, as well as the decision not to approve an exceptional extension of his appointment beyond retirement age.
Judgment keywords
Keywords
extension of contract; un common system; retirement age; complaint dismissed
Consideration 12
Extract:
It is desirable […] to consider the question of whether a request for extension needs to be in writing. There is no express requirement in the Staff Rules to this effect and none, in particular, in the relevant provision, namely Staff Rule 1020.1.4. However, there is a procedure for requesting an exceptional extension of an appointment set out in Section III.10.8 of the WHO eManual at paragraph 20. It provides: “In all cases, requests for extensions must be submitted to the Director-General through the Director, HRD and requests will not be granted for more than one year at a time.” This does not say, expressly, that the request needs to be in writing. However, impliedly it does need to be in writing. The use of the word “submitted” is, in context, a clear pointer to this conclusion. Also, a procedure which requires a request to be made through the Director, HRD, almost certainly needs to be in writing. Virtually inevitably any such request, whether by the staff member concerned or a supervisor on the staff member’s behalf, would need to contain the reasons why the circumstances were exceptional and why it was in the interests of the Organization to grant the extension, in order to persuade the Director-General to do so. Plainly, the Director, HRD, is intended to be something more than a “letter box” to pass on requests to the Director-General. Implicit in this arrangement is that the Director, HRD, can provide some preliminary assessment or commentary to assist the Director-General in making the ultimate decision and, in particular, assessing whether the extension would be in the interests of the Organization. It is difficult to conceive of how this scheme could operate if the request could be made orally. It is highly unlikely that it is contemplated a request can be made orally, considered and then transmitted with the attendant risk that the Director, HRD, might misunderstand or misrepresent even innocently what was being put by the person making the request.
Keywords
claim
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