Legal news

  1. Accueil
  2. News
  3. Legal news
  4. Court of Cassation ruling : new int...

Court of Cassation ruling : new interpretation of the scope of an employee’s right of access to his professional emails

In a ruling dated June 18, 2025 [1], the Social Chamber of the Court of Cassation held that an employee’s right of access to his professional emails covered not only metadata but also the content of the emails.

Called upon to rule on the scope of the right of access in a dispute between an employee and his employer in the context of his dismissal, the Court of Cassation held that "emails sent or received by the employee using his work email account are personal data within the meaning of Article 4 of the GDPR and, that the employee has the right to access these emails, the employer being required to provide both the metadata (time stamp, recipients) and their content, unless the information requested is likely to infringe on the rights and freedoms of others.".

With this decision, the Court of Cassation goes beyond the position of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which had considered that, in the event of the exercise of the right of access, copies of extracts from documents, or of entire documents, containing the said data should only be provided if the provision of such a copy is “essential to enable the data subject to effectively exercise the rights conferred on him [...]” [2].

In accordance with the position of the CJEU, the French data protection authority (CNIL) also points out on its website [3] that “The right of access applies only to personal data and not to documents”, and that an organisation may communicate documents containing the data of the data subject, rather than the data alone, “if there is no obstacle to doing so and if it is more practical”.