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Right to own image and protection of personal reputation.

Last 17 October, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (TEDH) in the López Ribalda et al. case against Spain, resolved in the ruling of its Judgment that there was no violation of the privacy of the applicants whose company, Mercadona, fired on the occasion of recordings obtained through hidden video surveillance systems, where workers could be seen stealing company products.

The plaintiffs asked the ECHR to declare that the rights to respect for private life and to a fair trial have been violated, regulated in articles 8 and 6.1, respectively, of the European Convention on Human Rights.

In said resolution the Court, rectifying the Judgment issued by its Chamber at the beginning of the year, justified the legitimacy of the recordings based on previous suspicions that these actions had been taking place and the lack of a less intrusive means of proof, Therefore, he understood that there was no violation of the articles of the Convention.

In Spain, the installation of security cameras in companies to control work and their use for disciplinary purposes requires jurisprudence compulsorily a prior information duty, clear and concise to workers and their representatives, being necessary the existence of an information device in a sufficiently visible place.

At the same time, its installation in services, showers, changing rooms or rest areas is outside the power of management of the company, being prohibited zones, thus safeguarding the privacy of workers.

In the present case, the company complied, according to the Court, these information tasks with the cameras that you installed in a visible way, not so with the hidden ones, extreme that was not an impediment to declare their legality due to the short duration of the recordings and that they were viewed by a small number of people, not producing a high degree of interference in the private life of the workers.

The right to one's own image and the use of video surveillance systems as the company's management power they move in a constantly changing terrain, whose interrelation supposes from time to time a new framework for study and debate, which in turn causes national and supranational Courts to have to go "behind the scenes" of today, limiting the limits of one and the other, since these are increasingly diffuse.