A “surprising” European Court of Human Rights decision that companies have the right to monitor their workers’ online private messages during office hours, also applies in Malta, legal sources said.

“This caught me entirely by surprise. It appears to go against most of the decisions taken by the European courts,” one veteran lawyer who asked not to be named said.

The ECHR made the ruling on Tuesday on a case involving a Romanian engineer who was fired after using Yahoo Messenger not only to communicate with professional contacts, but also to send private messages to his fiancée and brother during office hours.

The court said it was not “unreasonable that an employer would want to verify that employees were completing their professional tasks during working hours”, adding that the company had not accessed the messages to spy on him but in the belief that they contained professional communications.

Paul Gonzi, a lawyer specialised in computer and communications law told the Times of Malta the ECHR’s judgments were binding in countries that had ratified the European Convention on Human Rights, something Malta did back in 1965. This, however, did not mean companies could start sifting through employees’ personal correspondence with impunity.

It appears to go against most of the decisions taken by the European courts

“This has to be taken in the context of several different judgements. The specifics of this case might mean it applies in certain instances but not in others. There are several ECHR judgments on such issues,” Dr Gonzi said.

The Romanian employee, Bogdan Mihai Barbulescu, had been asked by his employers to create the Yahoo account in order to answer clients’ queries in 2007. However, he was approached by his employers and told that they had been monitoring his chats over several days, citing the company policy that the service should have been used for work purposes only.

He was presented with a 45-page transcript of his messages, including those sent to his fiancée.

Marvin Cuschieri, the director general of the Foundation for Human Resources Development, said the judgement would probably not leave major ripples locally because of “a problem of size”.

“This is an issue that has existed since the invention of the e-mail. Companies do not want employees using company resources for things other than company business. The problem, however, remains one of resources. In Malta only large companies have the resources to monitor employees’ correspondence,” he said.

Mr Cuschieri said that employees would ideally know the company’s policy on social media use and private correspondence upon joining the company. Any changes, he added, would need to be communicated to the employees clearly. The problem, however, was that this was not always done, especially in smaller companies.