Judgment Unjustified body search an accident at work

LSG Darmstadt: Search was purely professional
Mental consequences of an unjustified body search are to be compensated as an accident at work, if the search goes back solely to the professional activity. Accordingly, this also applies to health damage caused by other professionally induced police measures, as the Hessian State Social Court (LSG) in Darmstadt, Germany, in a ruling announced on Thursday, 2 November 2017 (Ref .: L 3 U 70/14).

Mental consequences after being searched by police. (Image: Drobot Dean / fotolia.com)

It was right for a railway employee. She worked at the service point of the long-distance railway station at the Frankfurt airport. During her work, the platform supervisor handed her a backpack, the contents of which she documented in the presence of a colleague. Later, money, jewelry and a computer hard drive were missing from the backpack.

Officials of the Federal Police took the railway employee to the police station. There she had to undergo a body search and completely undress for this. As a result of this unnecessary and degrading measure, the 44-year-old developed a mental illness.

The Federal and State accident insurance did not want to recognize this as an accident at work. The police control had been a private matter that had interrupted the accident insurance.

According to the Darmstadt judgment, the accident insurance here, however, must recognize an accident at work. Private actions had played no role in the body search. Trigger and occasion was "only the professional activity of the railway employee been". She also pursued this activity in accordance with the rules of the service.

Moreover, such police measures are an "external impact on the body", the LSG continues. By law, it is a precondition for a work accident that such an external event leads to damage to health.

Here "the unjustified measures of the police (...) would have led directly to feelings of being at the mercy of helplessness and powerlessness". Therefore, there is a health damage. The reason for this was solely the professional activity, according to the LSG in its judgment of 17 October 2017.

However, the judges emphasized that this does not automatically apply to any police action. No accident protection would then exist, for example, when workers want to escape traffic or ticket control during a business trip or on the way to or from work and are therefore subject to police compulsion. mwo / fle