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Business Development: Playing The Right Card
Leor Franks
The Divisional Court has ruled (in R (P and A) v Secretary of State for Justice [2016] EWHC 89 (Admin)) that the criminal records disclosure scheme used in England and Wales is “arbitrary” and unlawful. This blog post considers the ruling from both a criminal and an employment law perspective. To give some context to the ruling, a brief summary of the statutory scheme for disclosing criminal records in England and Wales may be helpful.
Ever been tempted to surreptitiously e-mail yourself a couple of documents from work, just in case? Maybe you want them as evidence of your past experience when moving roles; or maybe you think you will need to use them against your employer at some point in the future? Well don’t! And remember this case next time you are tempted.
The decision of the European Court of Human Rights last week appeared to answer a difficult question for employers, namely are they able to snoop on their employees' electronic communications to check they are complying with their email / electronic communications policies? In that case, the answer had been “yes”, because a fair balance had been struck between the employee's right to respect for his private life on the one hand, and his employer's interests, such as to check for potential damage to their IT systems, illicit activity in the company's name or the leaking of company secrets, on the other.
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