The session in numbers

The Administrative Tribunal of the International Labour Organization held its 142nd Session from 27 April to 29 May 2026. According to the Registrar's official notice, the Tribunal adopted 117 judgments (Judgments 5204 to 5320), 16 of them under the summary procedure, disposing of 134 complaints filed by 106 complainants against 19 organisations; eleven complaints had been withdrawn by Order of the President since the close of the 141st Session. The judgments were delivered publicly on 16 July 2026.

At the time of writing, 111 of the 117 judgments are available in full text; six (5209, 5220, 5261, 5262, 5263 and 5265) are listed as "(Extracts)" with no translation yet available. All figures below refer to those 111, not to the 117 adopted. On that corpus, 81 complaints (73.0%) were dismissed in their entirety, while 30 (27.0%) obtained some form of relief. The docket was heavily concentrated: the European Patent Organisation accounted for 43 judgments (38.7%), followed by Eurocontrol (13), the IOC (11) and the WHO (9). Success rates diverged sharply: complainants prevailed, at least in part, in 6 of 9 WHO cases and 8 of 13 Eurocontrol cases, but in only 4 of 43 EPO cases. One discrepancy is recorded rather than resolved: 17 of the 111 available judgments appear as summary-procedure decisions, against the 16 reported in the official notice. All summary-procedure judgments, and all five applications for review, were dismissed.

Discipline and the standard of proof: the WHO cluster

Judgment 5234 (WHO). A dismissal for sexual harassment was set aside on two independent grounds. First, the investigator had declined, without any stated justification, to hear the defence witnesses the accused had asked to be heard, while the case against him rested largely on witnesses proposed by the person who lodged the harassment complaint — a serious procedural flaw, following Judgment 5003, a strongly similar WHO case. Secondly, an error of law on the standard of proof: the less onerous standard governing harassment claims operates only as between the alleged victim and the organisation, for recognition, compensation or protective measures; where the allegation founds disciplinary proceedings against the accused official, the facts must be established beyond reasonable doubt (Judgments 4663 and 4289). WHO was ordered to withdraw the complainant's record from the Clear Check database and to pay six months' salary in material damages and 25,000 United States dollars in moral damages, reflecting in part the excessive 13-month length of an internal appeal concerning a dismissal.

Judgment 5235 (WHO). The Global Board of Appeal found the sexual harassment charge not established beyond reasonable doubt, leaving only abuse of authority (accepting a loan from a supervisee) and non-disclosure of an intimate relationship. The Director-General accepted that finding yet maintained the dismissal by recharacterising the surviving charges as "workplace harassment". This, the Tribunal held, was a new charge on which the official had never been heard: a defence to abuse of authority is not a defence to the allegation that the same conduct created a hostile work environment. The decision was set aside — except the removal of the complainant's name from Clear Check — and the matter remitted, with 5,000 dollars in moral damages and 10,000 euros in costs.

Separation, non-renewal and the duty of care

Judgment 5208 (UNIDO). The largest aggregate award of the session — 110,000 euros — went to an official with over 33 years of continuous fixed-term service, separated on the Organization's mistaken belief that he had elected to retire. Deferring to the unanimous findings of the Joint Appeals Board, the Tribunal found the non-extension unlawful on four cumulative grounds: the reason relied upon was factually wrong and therefore invalid; notice came barely a month before expiry; no reassignment effort was made despite options identified internally; and the official was kept in the dark, in breach of the duty of care and transparency. Two limits matter as much as the findings: the Tribunal rejected both the claim to a termination indemnity (expiry of a fixed-term appointment is not a termination) and the argument that decades of consecutive fixed-term contracts had matured into a permanent appointment, distinguishing Judgments 3225 and 3090, which concerned strings of short-term contracts.

Judgment 5204 (Energy Charter Conference). The Advisory Board found that elements of harassment by the Deputy Secretary-General were established; the Secretary-General's only response was to refer the report to the Management Committee, and no decision on the harassment complaint was ever taken. The Tribunal held the complaint receivable on either of two bases — the referral email was itself a final decision, or the ensuing silence amounted to an implied rejection — clarifying that steps taken to deal with a claim cannot be used to defer indefinitely a decision the organisation has no intention of making. On the merits, the organisation erred in law by treating the complaint solely as a question of possible discipline against the alleged perpetrator: the staff member who lodges such a complaint is entitled to a decision on the harassment itself. Moral damages of 35,000 euros were awarded.

Reading the rules purposively

Judgment 5238 (WHO). A staff member reassigned to a lower-graded post amid a restructuring was denied retention of his personal grade because, on a literal reading of the eManual, the reassignment had begun before formal notification of the abolition of his post. The Tribunal rejected that chronological construction as unreasonable and inconsistent with the duty of care and good faith: what matters is that the reassignment is causally linked to the abolition, and staff who proactively seek alternative posts once a restructuring is announced cannot fare worse than those who await formal notification. Retention was ordered with all consequential salary differences.

The EPO docket: serial litigation and institutional disputes

Judgment 5298 (EPO). Anchoring a block of fourteen judgments on the 2015 career-system reform, the Tribunal delivered its most emphatic statement of the session on stare decisis. The lawfulness of decision CA/D 10/14, of the career system, of the transposition mechanism and of its effects on promotion prospects has been settled (Judgments 5089, 5091, 4711 and 4712), and complainants may not relitigate those issues even through arguments not previously advanced — such pleas, the Tribunal said, "are otiose". Internal appeal organs and administrations, it added, should themselves follow the Tribunal's established principles, on pain of legal instability and pointless expense.

Judgment 5278 (EPO). The lead case of the fiscal sub-block, with 147 interveners, on the claim that the EPO had promised that the "partial compensation" for national taxation of pensions would itself be tax-free. Applying the four-element test for a binding promise from Judgment 4527, the Tribunal found no promise: the relevant statement expressed a legal characterisation contingent on the sovereign interpretation of national tax law. In any event there was no uncompensated loss, given the built-in gross-up; and no principle of international law obliges an organisation to offset disparities produced by Member States' sovereign tax action.

Judgment 5297 (EPO). Against the wall of dismissals, this judgment set aside decisions rejecting as manifestly irreceivable internal appeals against the July 2020 payslips issued under the new remuneration-adjustment procedure. The transitional measure in decision CA/D 4/20 immediately altered the legal framework for the second half of 2020; the July 2020 payslips were therefore the first individual implementation of the general decision and generated a cause of action. As the internal appeals had been disposed of summarily, without touching the merits, the cases were remitted rather than decided by the Tribunal.

Judgment 5315 (EPO). Six staff representatives challenged the complete withdrawal of secretarial support from the Staff Committee. Decisions allocating resources to staff bodies are in principle beyond judicial review, but remain reviewable where the right of association may be affected — a framework developed for trade unions, here extended to staff committees. Article 34(3) of the Service Regulations obliges the President to grant the resources required for staff representation, which includes secretarial support as needed. Refusing any such support breached that obligation; the matter was remitted for a fresh assessment of current needs, the setting aside being itself sufficient redress for any moral injury.

Access to the Tribunal, at both ends

Judgment 5252 (IOC). With both the Chairman and the Alternate Chairman of the internal appeal body recused for conflict of interest, the complainant's appeals against two written reprimands could not be heard at all. This paralysis of the internal appeal procedure satisfied the exhaustion requirement of Article VII of the Statute; on the merits, the reprimands fell because the follow-up report required by the disciplinary procedure had been placed in the personal file without first being shown to the official for comment. Moral damages were refused: a flawed decision does not of itself establish moral injury, and delay requires proof of its adverse effects.

Judgment 5272 (Eurocontrol). The final decision on the cancellation of the 2021 promotion exercise was set aside for breach of the adversarial principle: a substantiated file on the organisation's budgetary difficulties had been given to the internal appeal body but withheld from the appellant — a defect that cannot be cured later where the document is of vital importance to the dispute. On the substance, however, the cancellation itself was upheld, following Judgments 3279, 3280 and 5166, with the refinement that a second consecutive cancellation demands particularly exceptional and duly established circumstances, satisfied here. The award was correspondingly modest: 2,000 euros in moral damages each for the complainant and nine interveners. The set-aside is procedural, not substantive; whether the same pattern holds across the wider Eurocontrol cluster can only be confirmed against the related judgments in full text.

Judgment 5224 (Interpol). At the opposite end of the access spectrum, the Tribunal dismissed a former official's seventh complaint — alleging that documents were unlawfully withheld from her medical file — as speculative and, exceptionally, ordered her to pay the organisation 1,000 euros in costs, describing the complaint as vexatious and frivolous. Such orders must remain exceptional, lest they chill access to the Tribunal, but the threshold was met here, as in Judgment 5138 concerning the same litigant.

Continuity and rupture

The session is overwhelmingly one of consolidation. The dual standard of proof in harassment matters is now firmly entrenched (5234, applying 4663 and 4289), as are the accused's right to the hearing of defence witnesses (5234, following 5003) and the prohibition on recharacterising charges after the fact (5235, in the line of 4063 and 2786). The complainant-side harassment doctrine of 4207, 4547 and 4900 is applied without hesitation in 5204, and deference to well-reasoned internal appeal findings does decisive work in 5208.

Three developments stand out: 5298 converts stare decisis from a rule of the Tribunal's own practice into a discipline expressly urged upon internal organs and administrations; 5315 grounds a positive obligation to provide secretarial support to staff committees in the right of association; and 5272 sharpens the test for repeated cancellations of promotion exercises. Alongside them, 5238's causal rather than chronological reading of grade-retention rules and 5204's refusal to let procedural steps mask a settled intention not to decide show the Tribunal privileging substance over administrative form.

A note on method

This digest is based on the 111 judgments of the 142nd Session available in full text at the time of writing; session-wide figures follow the Registrar's official notice. Dispositive provisions were extracted from the full text of each judgment; thematic descriptors are generated by International AT Search and are not attributable to the Tribunal. Where the available material does not support a general claim, the gap is stated rather than filled.