Bonum Certa Men Certa

The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXXV: In the Shadow of “Waite and Kennedy”

Series parts:

  1. The EPO's Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part I: Let the Sunshine In!
  2. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part II: A “Unanimous” Endorsement?
  3. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part III: Three Missing Votes
  4. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part IV: The Founding States
  5. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part V: Germany Says “Ja”
  6. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part VI: A Distinct Lack of Dutch Courage
  7. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part VII: Luxembourgish Laxity
  8. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part VIII: Perfidious Albion and Pusillanimous Hibernia
  9. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part IX: More Holes Than Swiss Cheese
  10. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part X: Introducing the Controversial Christian Bock
  11. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XI: “General Bock” - Battistelli's Swiss Apprentice?
  12. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XII: The French Connection
  13. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XIII: Battistelli's Iberian Facilitators - Spain
  14. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XIV: Battistelli's Iberian Facilitators - Portugal
  15. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XV: Et Tu Felix Austria…
  16. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XVI: The Demise of the Austrian Double-Dipper
  17. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XVII: The Non-Monolithic Nordic Bloc
  18. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XVIII: Helsinki's Accord
  19. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part IXX: The Baltic States
  20. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XX: The Visegrád Group
  21. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXI: The Balkan League – The Doyen and His “Protégée”
  22. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXII: The Balkan League - North Macedonia and Albania
  23. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXIII: The Balkan League - Bulgaria
  24. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXIV: The Balkan League - Romania
  25. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXV: The Balkan League - Fresh Blood or Same Old, Same Old?
  26. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXVI: A Trojan Horse on the Budget and Finance Committee
  27. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXVII: Cypriot Complicity
  28. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXVIII: Benoît and António's Loyal “Habibi”
  29. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part IXXX: The EPOnian Micro-States - Monaco and Malta
  30. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXX: San Marino and the Perfidious Betrayal of Liberty
  31. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXI: The Abstentionists
  32. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXII: “Plucky Little Belgium”?
  33. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXIII: Swedish Scepticism
  34. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXIV: An “Extremely Dubious” Proposal
  35. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXV: Slovakian Scruples
  36. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXVI: Serbian Sour Grapes
  37. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXVII: Stubbornly Independent Slovenia
  38. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXVIII: Ensnared in the Tentacles of the SAZAS Octopus
  39. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXIX: On the Slippery Slope to Capture
  40. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXX: The Idiosyncratic Italians
  41. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXXI: Public Service or Self-Service?
  42. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXXII: A Parcel of Rogues?
  43. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXXIII: A Legal No-Man's Land
  44. The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXXIV: Immunity = Impunity?
  45. YOU ARE HERE ☞ In the Shadow of “Waite and Kennedy”


Court House
Everybody is entitled to their day in court.
Well, maybe not, if you happen to work for an international organisation.



Summary: The EPO's immunity is troublesome for a plethora of reasons; this sort of problem has long been recognised in a broader context

As we mentioned in the last part, the immunities accorded to international organisations mean that their staff are precluded from pursuing their grievances before national courts of law.



Instead, staff are obliged to have recourse to internal dispute resolution mechanisms involving opaque procedures, whose compliance with the most basic requirements of due process is often open to question.

"The risk of a "denial of justice" arises because - unlike employees in the national domain - staff of an international organisation have no access to a domestic court of law in the case of a dispute with their employer."The internal means of redress provided by an international organisation is usually supplemented by a final possibility of judicial review before an international tribunal such as the ILOAT in Geneva.

These parallel legal systems have developed because of a general recognition that the immunity of an international organisation could be problematic from the rule of law perspective.

The risk of a "denial of justice" arises because - unlike employees in the national domain - staff of an international organisation have no access to a domestic court of law in the case of a dispute with their employer.

As a workaround, an approach to dispute resolution has been developed which relies on what are called "internal justice systems".

"As a workaround, an approach to dispute resolution has been developed which relies on what are called "internal justice systems"."The legal scholar Anne-Marie Thévenot-Werner - a professor of law at the Sorbonne University in France - has written extensively on the topic, for example in an article entitled "The Right of Staff Members to a Tribunal as a Limit to the Jurisdictional Immunity of International Organisations in Europe" which was published in 2014.

In this article Thévenot-Werner explains how national courts in Europe have come to recognise that the immunity from national jurisdiction accorded to an international organisation cannot be considered absolute because this could lead to a "denial of justice".

Such immunity is contingent on the guarantee of an effective legal remedy being available to staff in the form of an internal dispute settlement mechanism which provides "equivalent protection" to that provided by a national legal system.

This principle is echoed in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) which monitors compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

"In this way - or so the theory goes - even when states transfer certain competences to international organisations, human rights supervisory bodies such as the ECtHR can continue to hold states to account for the use of those powers."The ECtHR has found that the ECHR does not exclude states from transferring competences to international organisations. However, states which are signatories of the ECHR have a responsibility to ensure that their human rights obligations will receive an "equivalent protection" within the context of those international organisations in which they participate.

In this way - or so the theory goes - even when states transfer certain competences to international organisations, human rights supervisory bodies such as the ECtHR can continue to hold states to account for the use of those powers.

The Court's position is based on the consideration that if the contracting states of the ECHR, were permitted to use their membership of an international organisation as an "excuse" for evading their responsibilities under the Convention this would lead to a "loophole" in human rights protection which would be incompatible with the object and purpose of the ECHR.

According to the Court's jurisprudence, the alternative means of legal process on which staff of international organisations are obliged to rely must provide "reasonable alternative means to protect effectively their rights under the [European] Convention [on Human Rights]".

ECHR
In its landmark judgment delivered in 1999 the ECtHR confirmed that international organisations are obliged to provide their staff with "reasonable alternative means" to protect their fundamental rights under the ECHR.



This was spelt out by the Court in the landmark judgments delivered in 1999 in the cases of "Waite and Kennedy v. Germany" and "Beer and Regan v. Germany".

Those judgments and their implications for international organisations are discussed in some detail in the article In the Shadow of Waite and Kennedy: The Jurisdictional Immunity of International Organisations, the individual's Right of Access to the Courts and Administrative Tribunals as Alternative Means of Dispute Settlement" published in 2004. This article was co-authored by August Reinisch, Professor of International and European Law at the University of Vienna, and Ulf Andreas Weber, a practicing attorney in Berlin specializing in employment law focusing on staff disputes in international organizations.

All of this sounds fine in theory.

"...some subsequent judgments of the ECtHR delivered in 2015 indicate that the Court is extremely reluctant to pursue alleged breaches of fundamental rights involving international organisations."However, in practice, the internal dispute resolution mechanisms of international organisations are rarely fit for purpose and this often leads to a de facto denial of justice.

Moreover, as we shall see in the next part, some subsequent judgments of the ECtHR delivered in 2015 indicate that the Court is extremely reluctant to pursue alleged breaches of fundamental rights involving international organisations.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Techrights Will Spend the Next Few Years Writing a Lot About Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs)
It's a growing problem
The State of EPO Staff's Health in Rijswijk or The Hague
We're going to cover the EPO some more later in the month
NVIDIA Corp Lost 36% of Its "Value" Since Cheeto Inauguration, But "Gen Hey Hi" (GenAI) is Totally Not a Bubble
Selling loads of unneeded hardware based on hysterical hype; like selling shovels during a Gold Rush
 
Gemini Links 05/04/2025: Offline is For Everyone, Copyright Colonialism, and More
Links for the day
Links 05/04/2025: TikTok Unsold (Still), Royal Society is Dead
Links for the day
GNU/Linux Growing in East Asia, Windows by Default No More?
GNU/Linux is now on the shelf
Slopwatch: Anti-Linux 'Articles' From Linux-Hostile LLMs
It is almost always negative things and nobody can be held responsible for it except the charlatans prompting the LLMs
Links 05/04/2025: Fentanylware (TikTok) "Sale Looks Highly Imminent" (US), Stock Market Drowning in Panic
Links for the day
Gemini Links 05/04/2025: Moving Plants, No to Smartwatches, RAID Hygiene
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 04, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, April 04, 2025
Techrights Has Dealt With More Potent SLAPPs Than Violent Microsofters Begging to Hide What They Did to Women
I became accustomed to SLAPPs
Links 04/04/2025: Fury in South Korea, Flight MH370 Remains Mystery
Links for the day
Gemini Links 04/04/2025: Anger and Raspberry Pi CM4
Links for the day
Links 04/04/2025: LLM Slop Bubble Bursting and Korea Music Copyright Association Bans Slop 'Music'
Links for the day
Traf-O-Data, the Company That Jeffrey Epstein's BFF (Bill Gates) (Co)Founded 53 Years and Went Out of Business Due to Heavy Losses
Who will die first, Bill or Microsoft?
Why Microsoft's Shares Sank Almost 20% in Recent Months (the Bubble is Imploding)
verified press reports from the past 24 hours
A Note on SimilarWeb
Or why SimilarWeb is meaningless for more than 99% of the sites on the Web
GNU/Linux Rises to Almost 5% in Algeria While Windows Sinks to All-Time Low
GNU/Linux grew tenfold
Where to Get More Gags
A valued reader recommended that to us
Links 04/04/2025: Tech Stock (Inc. GAFAM) Fall, Google Pretends to Do End-to-End Encrypted Emails (With Google in Control)
Links for the day
IBM Said to be Shutting Down Offices or Sites in the United States
the press can no longer avoid admitting that IBM moves many jobs to India
To Participate in Fedora Diversity You Must Use Proprietary Software
Not for the first time either
LLM Slop as Attack Vector on the Reputation of Linux
The attacks on Linux have escalated to information warfare
Yandex About to Be Three Times Bigger Than Microsoft (Bing) in Asia
That's about 60% of the world's population
Gemini Links 04/04/2025: Decoupling Updates, Elaho as Gemini Client
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, April 03, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, April 03, 2025
Microsoft's Trouble in Africa and Asia
A new all-time high for GNU/Linux
Brett Wilson LLP Reported to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)
The saddest thing in all this is that law firms can maintain high standards shall they wish to
Links 03/04/2025: Tariff Pains and C.D.C. Cuts
Links for the day
StatCounter: Microsoft is Masking a Disaster, It's Way Behind DeepSeek Already and Interest in LLMs Has Waned
it turns out the money "raised" for "Open" "AI" may not even exist at all
Links 03/04/2025: SoftBank Money for Microsoft "Open" "AI" Probably Doesn't Even Exist, Wikimedia Foundation Blasts LLM Nuisance While Microsoft Admits Demand Has Shrunk
Links for the day
Gemini Links 03/04/2025: Patch Panel and Pictures
Links for the day
Islamic Republic of Iran: GNU/Linux at All-time High This Month, Windows Falls to 12%
Vista 10 is up this month despite being "end of life" (EoL) soon
Indonesia: All-Time Highs for GNU/Linux
What's noteworthy right now is the growth of GNU/Linux
statCounter Says GNU/Linux Usage is Up Again (Internationally)
some preliminary April data
Only on April 1st Can the Free Software Foundation Associate With Microsoft's Open Source Initiative (OSI)
We saw some pranks that day linking the FSF to Microsoft (e.g. "endorsing" Windows)
Confirmed in the Mainstream Media: A Lot of Microsoft "Workloads" Were Just LLM Slop (Helping to Fake Growth for Years, as Microsoft Had Paid "Open" "AI" to Become a "Client") and Demand is Rapidly Waning, Datacentres Canceled and/or Shut Down
Anything to facilitate further accounting fraud
Taiwan's Media Covers Closure of Microsoft's "AI" Lab, It's Time to Talk About the Gradual Death of Windows and Implosion of the "AI" Bubble
Earlier this week we showed that mostly Asian media had the 'nerve' to mention Microsoft silently shutting down its 'AI' lab
IBM Gets Rid of Kelly Chambliss as Mass Layoffs Reported in IBM Consulting, IBM Loses Key Contracts/Graft
IBM Consulting has been in disarray lately
More Gains for GNU/Linux, Based on Web Surveys
the Steam site shows rapid growth for "Linux" this month
Slopwatch: Anti-Linux Articles, Not Even Written by Humans
Why aren't Web sites more vocal about this problem?
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, April 02, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, April 02, 2025
Links 03/04/2025: Apple Fined Over Secret Surveillance, "Elegant Writer For A More Civilized Age"
Links for the day