The employer’s safety obligation: the case of the Ivory Coast

19 July 2020

Whatever the country, one of the first obligations to which an employer is subject is the obligation of safety. The Ivory Coast is no less an exception. Thus, Article 41.2 of the Ivorian Labor Code refers to this obligation by stating: “To protect the life and health of employees, the employer is required to take all useful measures that are appropriate to the operating conditions of the company. However, this rule remains rather vague and can thus be subject to various interpretations. Indeed, the Ivorian Labor Code indicates in its Article 1 “that it governs relations between employers and workers resulting from employment contracts concluded for execution on the territory of the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire.”

The article adds: “it also governs the occasional performance, in the territory of the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire, of an employment contract concluded for performance in another State”, provided that it exceeds three months. But there is no provision specifying whether the opposite applies. One may therefore wonder how far this obligation can be extended.

Does an employee in Côte d’Ivoire who travels to another country for the performance of his professional activity benefit from the protection of his employer?

Although the Ivorian Labor Code does not explicitly address this issue, it should be noted that Côte d’Ivoire is a party to the treaty on the harmonization of business law in Africa, the founding text of OHADA. And for some years now, OHADA has initiated a bill on the harmonization of labor law in Africa. The text of this project includes in its definition of work-related accidents, those that occurred during travel, the costs of which were borne by the employer. One can deduce from this, once this text is adopted, that it will be the employer’s responsibility to ensure the safety of his employee during the occasional performance of his professional activity in another territory other than the Ivory Coast.