Incapacity for work does not entitle the employee to accumulate vacation entitlements indefinitely

In the case of a civil servant who fell ill in January 2017 as a result of an occupational accident and who was transferred to early retirement in 2019 after a brief attempt at reintegration due to the consequential damage to his health, the Trier Administrative Court has now ruled against his claim for financial compensation for his entitlement to remaining leave.

The plaintiff, who was an active civil servant at the time of the occupational accident, demanded financial compensation from his employer for his leave entitlement in the accident year 2017, citing the minimum annual leave stipulated under European law. This had not been granted to him in advance by the defendant because the plaintiff had not submitted his leave entitlement within the specified period.

According to the plaintiff, this was primarily due to the ongoing incapacity to work as a result of the work accident. The plaintiff referred to the case law of the European Court of Justice, which had ruled in the past that the employer must inform the civil servant of the consequences of a missing application or transfer application in the event of a permanent illness. According to the plaintiff, the employer had not provided any information.

Trier Administrative Court dismissed the action in its ruling

The judges ruled that the plaintiff's entitlement to financial compensation from the defendant for his untaken annual leave for 2017 expired at the end of March 31, 2019 in accordance with the relevant provisions (case no. 7K 2761/20 of January 4, 2021). The court further ruled that the leave entitlement also expired according to the case law of the European Court of Justice if the period after the end of the leave year in which the leave was not taken was too long. Consequently, according to the court, there is no right to an unlimited accumulation of paid annual leave entitlements.

The reason given by the court for this was that once a certain time limit had been exceeded, annual leave no longer had a positive effect on the employee as a period of rest. The court further ruled that it was irrelevant that the employer had not informed the civil servant of the expiry date of the leave entitlement for 2017, as the plaintiff had not been able to take his annual leave due to a lack of information on the part of the defendant, but primarily due to illness as a result of the work accident.

According to the court's decision, this also applies to the period of the civil servant's reintegration measures. During the reintegration period, the civil servant cannot be assumed to have a full service obligation from which he can be released for the purpose of taking leave. Rather, as the aim of the reintegration is a gradual rehabilitation of the civil servant in order to restore unrestricted fitness for duty, an entitlement to leave during the reintegration would obviously be contrary to its purpose.