Supreme Court of Appeals rules bosses can't terminate employees based on surveillance of messages

Duvar English 

Is there such a thing as “democratic surveillance”?

Turkey's Supreme Court of Appeals has ruled that a defendant employer who tracked the correspondence of his employee via a computer program he designed could not use this information as a reason for termination. 

An engineer working in a private company filed suit in a labor court on the basis that his contract was terminated by his employer without a valid reason and requested severance pay that was reportedly unpaid by the employer. 

The employer claimed that the plaintiff misled his boss by applying for jobs with other companies and conducting interviews with rival companies. The employer said that the engineer's computer was monitored for security purposes, and that his employment contract was terminated due to a justified reason within the scope of labor laws. 

Though the plaintiff did not win his case, he appealed to the Supreme Court, which determined that the plaintiff did not remove any secret business information that was not supposed to leave the workplace. The defendant employee reportedly did not provide any concrete evidence that the engineer was aware that he was being monitored, and for that reason the court determined that the information obtained could not be used as a reason for termination.

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