Court of Cassation: company documents usable during a Court case

With sentence no. 14305/2016 the Court of Cassation confirmed the unlawfulness of dismissal for disciplinary reasons in the case of an employee dismissed during a dispute over the recognition by the employer of a revised job description involving additional duties. The employee in question took possession of documents useful for the case, sending them from the company email address to a private address, and also submitted to the Court and made public a confidential private letter from the director to another female employee. The Court stated that its attitude had not changed (from its most recent ruling, no. 6420/2002) and affirmed that «an employee who, in the course of a dispute with the employer, submits copies of company papers directly impacting on his/her employment, is not in breach of the duty of loyalty as stipulated in section 2105 of the Civil Code, given that (…) the right to defense in a law suit must be deemed to prevail over the need for company secrecy». Moreover, according to the Court, when assessing the legitimacy of the mode in which the documentation was acquired by the employee, the Judge should consider «the possibility that the exercise of the right to defense justifies the conduct of the employee». In other words, with this sentence, the Court affirmed the following principle in law: the right to defense of the employee prevails over company secrecy.