An employee's crash on his way home is ruled a work-related accident, despite riding an electric scooter on a prohibited road
An insurance company challenged the original judgment, but it has now been ratified by a High Court in Spain
The High Court of Justice in Castilla y León has ruled that a kitchen assistant who fell off his scooter and fractured his tibia and fibula on his way home suffered a work-related accident. The High Court of Justice of Castilla y León ruled in the worker's favour after rejecting the appeal filed by the insurer Ibermutua in a case which was first heard in a court in Burgos.
His claim was that the accident should be classified as a common illness and not an accident at work and that the electric scooter was not a suitable means of transport for use on the BU-504 road, an interurban road on which, according to Spain's general traffic regulations. It is prohibited and, furthermore, it was "recklessness" on the part of the worker, which broke the work-related connection of the incident.
However, the court did not agree with this argument. "The simple infringement of traffic regulations does not in itself imply the appearance of reckless conduct classified as reckless, as it is obvious that not all of them have the same scope and intensity". In their assessment of the facts, the courts stated that there was no evidence to show that the employee consciously took an unnecessary risk.
For the magistrates, the only infringement found was that the worker was using his scooter on a prohibited route. "There is no evidence that the route followed was unusual or how the accident occurred. Specifically, there is no evidence that the road conditions were decisive or even minimally relevant in causing the accident, nor what influence the worker's driving had beyond the fact that he was driving on a forbidden road. In short, there was no evidence that the conditions and nature of that road were causally linked, directly or indirectly, to the origin and manner of the accident or that they entailed a serious and imminent risk," the ruling said.
In short, the ruling stated that the worker's conduct, "although reprehensible", is still a "simple" infringement of traffic regulations, but does not causally determine the accident and, therefore, "does not break its relationship with the work".
