An Asian engineer working for IBM has lost his Employment Tribunal, which dismissed all 30 acts of discrimination he claimed had been made against him. Taiyyib Azam accused his colleagues of bigotry when they used the word ‘blacklist’ during a team call in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in the US. However, the Tribunal found the use of the word was “entirely innocuous” and was used in the context of a specific list of IP addresses.

The cyber security expert made allegations of racism against colleagues in a bid to support “his views that every individual he interacted with was racist”, the Tribunal heard, and also alleged that his managers were using “black magic” and “voodoo” against him.

The Tribunal in Birmingham heard Azam began working for IBM in October 2015 as a cyber consultant, earning £55,000. After a year he asked for, and was denied, a promotion, and during subsequent years he persistently claimed that he was being denied promotions and claimed this was because of his race.

At the Tribunal, in which Azam represented himself, he said:

"I am the only Asian person in the group – I have seen other talented individuals of Indian heritage leave or be forced out for similar reasons.”

However, the Tribunal heard there were Asian employees at the company who advanced to the most senior positions and that Azam simply had “unrealistic expectations of his own progression”.

Said employment judge Geraldine Flood:

"We found this a puzzling allegation as the only reference to blacklisting at this time we saw in messages was made by Mr Azam and there is no evidence that [the colleague] was involved in any of these.”

The judge added there was no evidence that “race played any part in promotion decisions”.

Back in 2020, The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the branch of GCHQ dedicated to cyber security, banned the use of both blacklisting and whitelisting as terms. Both terms are common parlance in cyber security to describe desirable and undesirable things, such as which applications are allowed or denied on corporate networks.

The centre’s head of advice and guidance, said:

“There’s an issue with the terminology. It only makes sense if you equate white with ‘good, permitted, safe’ and black with ‘bad, dangerous, forbidden’. There are some obvious problems with this. So in the name of helping to stamp out racism in cyber security, we will avoid this casually pejorative wording on our website in the future.”

Employers can be held liable for instances of discrimination towards staff based on certain protected characteristics, including race. One type of discrimination is harassment, defined as unwanted verbal, non-verbal or physical conduct that violates the dignity of a person or creates a hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment. This can include so-called banter, as well as swearing and offensive language.