European Court of Human Rights – Gasparini v. Italy and Belgium

The case originated from an employment dispute involving the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Mr Gasparini, an Italian citizen employed in the NATO’s Headquarters in Belgium, attempted to challenge before the NATO Appeals Board an internal decision of the Council of NATO rising the the rate of staff contributions to the pension scheme. At the hearing of the proceeding before the Appeals Board, Mr Gasparini objected the conformity of the Appeals Board proceedings with the guarantees enshrined in Article 6 of the European Court on Human Rights, pointing out that the hearings were not public. The Appeals Board dismissed the application.

Gasparini filed an application to the European Court of Human Rights against Italy and Belgium, claiming that the internal proceeding before the NATO Appeals Board did not comply with the standards of justice and fair trial enshrined in Article 6.

The Court rejected the application finding that the respondent States did not violate the obligations of the Convention, since the provisions governing the procedure before the Appeals Board guaranteed a fair hearing. Thus, in the Court’s opinion, “the protection afforded to the applicant in the present case by NATO’s internal dispute resolution mechanism was not “manifestly deficient” within the meaning given to that expression by the Bosphorus judgment, particularly in the specific context of an organization such as NATO. The applicant had not therefore been justified in complaining that Italy and Belgium had endorsed a system that was in breach of the Convention, and the presumption of compliance with the Convention by those two States had not been rebutted.”