Civil servant unions lobbying to remove from their workplaces security-camera systems that have exposed corruption in some government offices have won a court ruling calling the monitoring “a violation of people’s private lives.”
The Office Workers Union, or BES, had applied to the Siirt Governor’s Office to remove the camera system monitoring workers in the eastern province’s Revenue Office. When the union’s application was refused, it took the case to an administrative court in Diyarbakır, which ruled that the workers’ rights were being violated.
After noting the governor’s memorandum making the presence of security cameras in public workplaces compulsory, the court said in its decision that while some of the cameras in the Revenue Office were used to monitor the building’s corridors and surroundings, others were observed to have been positioned to view civil servants at work at their desks. The court thus ruled that the security system was being used for a purpose beyond what it was intended to serve and violated the private life of workers by monitoring their interactions with colleagues and bosses.
Security cameras have at times been used to detect corruption carried out by civil servants. The prosecutor’s office in the southern province of Antalya has made use of such cameras to carry out an eight-month technical inquiry into the province’s real-estate registration office after receiving numerous complaints. Some 80 people, including more than 20 civil servants working in the registration office, were accused of corruption and arrested in 2007.
Other civil servant unions have also been calling for the removal of the camera systems in public administration buildings, although their recommendation would not be binding within the current legal framework, which gives the Prime Ministry the final word on such matters.
In its decision favoring the BES, the Diyarbakır court cited the eighth article of the European Convention on Human Rights, which deals with the protection of privacy, saying: “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”
