In its judgment rendered in the case of B?rbulescu v. Romania (application no. 61496/08) the European Court of Human Rights held, by six votes to one, that there had been: no violation of Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life, the home and correspondence) of the European Convention on Human Rights. The case concerned Mr B?rbulescu’s dismissal by his employer, a private company, for having used the company’s Internet for personal purposes during working hours in breach of internal regulations. Mr B?rbulescu used Yahoo Messenger on the company’s computer and he had done so during working hours. The Court found, in particular, that Mr B?rbulescu’s private life and correspondence had been engaged. However his employer’s monitoring of his communications had been reasonable and legitimate in the context of disciplinary proceedings as it had accessed the Yahoo Messenger account on the assumption that the information in question had been related to professional activities and that no particular weight has been attached to the actual content of the employee’s communications . In its dissenting opinion Judge Pinto de Albuquerque considered that «the novel features of this case concern the non-existence of an Internet surveillance policy, duly implemented and enforced by the employer, the personal and sensitive nature of the employee’s communications that were accessed by the employer, and the wide scope of disclosure of these communications during the disciplinary proceedings brought against the employee. These facts should have impacted on the manner in which the validity of the disciplinary proceedings and the penalty was assessed.»