Does the employment tribunal have the power to remove judgments from the online register?
No, held the EAT in Ameyaw v PWC.
A judgment following an open preliminary hearing was critical of Ms Ameyaw's behaviour at an earlier preliminary hearing. That judgment refused an application to strike out Ms Ameyaw's claims because of that behaviour. It was eventually published online.
A little over a year later, she applied for the claim to be taken offline and for an anonymity order. Both applications were refused and this was upheld on appeal. The EAT held:
"...there is no power vested in the ET to determine that a Judgment should not be entered in the Register and the limited power that exists to exclude Written Reasons from the Register relates only to national security cases...[T]he ET had no power to exclude the...Judgment from the Register."
The judge also held that there was no expectation of privacy in respect of the second preliminary hearing and so Article 8 ECHR was not engaged. Even if it were, the EAT decided that:
"the fact that the record of the proceedings, published without restriction, might be 'painful, humiliating, or deterrent' would not, of itself, mean that it should not be made public."
and so in this case the tribunal was entitled to refuse the anonymity order application.
Thanks to Matthew Jackson of 10 KBW for preparing this case summary.
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