A former PricewaterhouseCoopers employee convicted after disclosing details with a journalist revealing how some of the world’s biggest companies evaded taxes by setting up bases in Luxembourg, today won a bid to be recognised as a whistleblower rather than a criminal who stole private data.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled by a majority of 12 to five on Tuesday that “the public interest in the disclosure of that information outweighed all of the detrimental effects arising from it”.

Moreover, the ECHR ruled that Raphael Halet’s right to freedom of expression had been violated and that his original criminal conviction had a “chilling effect” on others who might speak out.

Halet’s information resulted in the LuxLeaks scandal, which exposed tax evasion being perpetrated by a number of multinational corporations in Luxembourg when he sent documents to French journalist Edouard Perrin.

In 2018 Halet was the joint recipient – along with murdered Slovak journalist Ján Kuciak – of the GUE/NGL (The Left in the European Parliament) award for ‘Journalists, Whistleblowers and Defenders of the Right to Information’.

The award is named in honour of assassinated Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.

Halet had filed an application against Luxembourg with the European Court of Human Rights at the end of the Luxleaks trial when he was fined €1,000 by the Luxembourg courts for leaking the information.

On Tuesday the ECHR, which had dismissed Halet’s case at first instance, ruled in a Grand Chamber judgment that the public interest in disclosing the information outweighed any harmful effects resulting from it.

The case concerned Halet’s disclosure while he was employed at PwC of confidential documents protected by professional secrecy Perrin, and which eventually resulted in a high-profile investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

The documents comprised 14 tax returns from multinational companies and two covering letters obtained from Halet’s place of work. Following a complaint by his employer, and at the close of criminal proceedings against him, Halet was ordered by the Court of Appeal on appeal to pay a criminal fine of €1,000 and a symbolic sum of €1 in compensation for the non-pecuniary damage sustained by his employer.

In view of its findings as to the importance, at both national and European level, of the public debate on the tax practices of multinational companies, to which the information disclosed by the applicant had made an essential contribution, the Court considered that the public interest in the disclosure of that information outweighed all of the detrimental effects arising from it.

The court said in its ruling that after weighing up all the interests concerned and taking account of the nature, severity and chilling effect of the applicant’s criminal conviction, “the interference with his right to freedom of expression, in particular his freedom to impart information, had not been ‘necessary in a democratic society’”.