By establishing the concept of “institutional psychological harassment,” France’s highest court has definitively recognized that a company and its executives may be held criminally liable when a management policy—implemented knowingly—has the effect of deteriorating employees’ working conditions.
The Court of Cassation’s ruling of January 21, 2025, definitively found seven executives—as well as France Télécom as a legal entity—guilty of “institutional psychological harassment” resulting from the company’s policy. With this new legal concept, a company and its executives can now be held criminally liable when they have “knowingly” implemented a corporate policy whose “purpose” or “effect” is to deteriorate employees’ working conditions.
In the early 2000s, CEO Didier Lombard launched the “New Telecommunications Experiences” (Next) plan, which called for 22,000 departures over three years—representing 20 percent of employees with civil servant status. Without resorting to traditional layoffs, the company devised a policy aimed at accelerating these departures.
Management at all levels creates an atmosphere of constant pressure, carries out ongoing and abusive reorganizations, and imposes forced transfers or isolation. Bullying of employees is common. Between 2008 and 2011, more than sixty employees committed suicide, and forty attempted to take their own lives. This “Next” plan was even described by the press as an “eradication plan.”
The ruling establishes the concept of institutional psychological harassment
In practice, this ruling thus establishes the very concept of institutional psychological harassment. As Michel Miné points out, institutional psychological harassment “is now enshrined at the highest level of case law […] a landmark ruling not only in criminal law but also in labor law.”
Complementing the law on psychological harassment, this development has far-reaching implications for employees in all organizations, as well as for their management and HR leaders. The latter are now criminally liable for the consequences of their policies. This therefore potentially opens up a new era in occupational health.
The ruling also applies to situations that occurred before 2025
Drawing primarily on the parliamentary proceedings regarding Law No. 2002-73 of January 17, 2002, on social modernization, the wording of this Court of Cassation ruling enshrines in law two provisions with far-reaching progressive implications. These provisions directly address the expectations of employees whose health has deteriorated as a result of organizational or managerial policies. Michel Miné sums up this development very well by noting that
"The judge is not there to pass judgment on strategic choices, but to examine the effects of the resulting management practices."
Following this ruling, an administrative court will now have the authority to “determine whether the method used to implement company policy exceeds the employer’s normal authority to manage and supervise” (§70). Thus, not everything is permissible simply because the freedom to conduct business requires strategic business decisions… that are not open to question. When it comes to occupational health, management decisions within an organization no longer enjoy complete immunity: they can be subject to judicial review.
Furthermore, this ruling establishes—in addition to the psychological harassment already defined in Article L.1152-1 of the Labor Code—a form of psychological harassment that does not require a relationship between individually identified persons. Without requiring one person to act against another, institutional psychological harassment can be directed at “others” (as stated in the ruling). Since there is no need to prove individual targeting, the harassment can therefore equally affect a team, a department, a group of employees, and, by extension, all members of an organization. In fact, “provided that they are part of the same work community and were likely to suffer or have suffered the consequences” of the managerial policy (§40).
The consequences of this ruling are, in fact, as far-reaching as they are profound. The first consequence of the January 2025 ruling is that it applies to situations that occurred before 2025. Indeed, this change in the law is considered to have been “foreseeable,” and therefore it can be applied to prior events.
This applies to all dysfunctional or harmful management policies
If the timeframe is broadened, so is the scope. By also holding the corporate entity France Télécom liable, the Court of Cassation potentially extends the scope to all types of organizations: from very small businesses to local governments, including hospitals and universities; all dysfunctional or harmful management practices are potentially affected.
This new development is interesting: public and bureaucratic organizations are, in fact, particularly prone to these policies, which have devastating effects yet are rarely discussed, as we have shown elsewhere using the example of mob harassment.
Thus, in the coming months, the first rulings from various courts will be announced and discussed. Administrative judges will be closely scrutinized to determine the extent to which they follow the ruling of the Court of Cassation—the highest court in the country—to see whether they will truly adhere to the ruling that recognizes institutional psychological harassment and, in doing so, extend this offense to the public sector.
Equality before the law should require that this type of decision also be adopted by administrative courts. It seems quite likely that administrative judges will follow this path, albeit with some modifications. An initial ruling by the Bordeaux Administrative Court of Appeals in April 2025 points in this direction. Thus, case law could, for example, lead to a university being found liable for “misconduct in public office” in cases of institutional workplace bullying. The judge will essentially have to decide between a ruling based on “liability for failure to act” (breach of the duty to protect employees) or “a criminal charge.” While the outcome of this decision remains to be seen, the era of impunity appears to be over: victims can now pursue criminal charges against the institution itself, in addition to labor or administrative remedies.
Second, this January 2025 ruling ultimately clarifies the scope of the parties involved and the implications for their liabilities. In particular, it highlights their potential criminal liability.
Simply put, if a management policy knowingly promotes management practices that are harmful to employees’ health, any executive—as well as any manager actively involved in promoting that policy—may be held liable. In its January 2025 ruling, the Court of Cassation thus highlights the “blind conformity” of management and human resources departments (HRDs), whose “procedures and methods have permeated the entire management policy.” Crucially, an HR department is potentially an “accomplice to the offense” of institutional psychological harassment when it supports harmful policies whose effects are known.
At a minimum, HR directors are therefore expected to exercise heightened vigilance when adopting management practices to avoid engaging in misconduct that inevitably carries criminal risk. More broadly, the professional stance of the HR director is being seriously called into question: given their knowledge of the purpose or effects of a policy on employee health, should they always support senior management, to which they are often very closely tied? If, for example, an HR director is aware of a manager’s intention to target one or more employees to the point where harm to their health is a possibility, what should be their stance or ethical approach—to use a concept dear to the human resources community?
Toward Shared Responsibility for Occupational Health?
Consequently, it is possible to outline future directions in light of this new assessment of responsibilities when a judge finds that institutional psychological harassment has occurred.
How, for example, can we assess the responsibility of elected officials on local government councils, or members of the boards of directors of universities, hospitals, or nonprofit organizations, when they show excessive leniency toward the implementation of management policies whose effects on employees’ health they are well aware of? As “decision-making bodies,” aren’t they complicit in these health hazards, just as France Télécom executives were?
Naturally, the same question can be posed to employee representatives and their stance. For most of them, it is clearly second nature to document workplace-related health issues among employees and to support employees in distress, including through legal means. The France Télécom case is, in fact, emblematic of the exemplary role played by union representatives. They conscientiously utilized the legal mechanisms provided for this purpose within organizations (notably the tools of the Health, Safety, and Working Conditions Committee (CSSCT)).
One question remains, however: What is the responsibility of employee representatives who, out of complacency, weakness, self-interest, or collusion with management, downplay or ignore the importance of addressing this new issue of institutional workplace bullying? In the France Télécom case, for example, the CFDT and FO union representatives were, according to the Solidaires union—a key player in providing support and filing complaints —“ in denial about the situation.” Let us never forget, however, that, as Milan Kundera put it, “a person is responsible for their ignorance; ignorance is a fault.”
For the working citizen, the legal recognition of institutional psychological harassment undoubtedly marks a new milestone: the era of impunity for executives and management seems, in any case, to be over, regardless of the organization in question. Everything indicates that employees can therefore feel a little less alone in the face of their potential suffering, as was already the case with the legal recognition of “psychological harassment” in 2002, following the pioneering work of Marie-France Hirigoyen and Christophe Desjours.
Ultimately, it appears that the initial challenge of legally defining this new aspect of workplace bullying has now been met. Since the facts are thus fairly well documented—particularly by employee representatives—the judge can proceed. However, it will still be necessary to, in the end, that tomorrow the various courts will respond, within a reasonable timeframe, to this immense demand for justice in the face of the missteps of leadership and managers whose deviant policies and toxic practices all cause profound—and often unheard—suffering in the workplace. This is the next challenge in occupational health that lies ahead of us.
