Lately Belarusian employers more often turn to such a legal and a social concept as "commercial secrecy", which offers employees to carry applicable obligations on protection and non-disclosure of data which is the company's commercial secrecy.  That is not a style tribute but a necessity because in business development and mobility of the labor market companies have to think about how to protect important information during employment process. The matter is especially high profile when employees switch over to competitive organizations, or, to former clients of the company. At the legislation level the issue of commercial secrecy protection is not regulated in detail - the only article of the Civil Code and the Decree of the Council of Ministers dated 1992 are dedicated to the issue.

According to the legislation a commercial secrecy has to comply with several criteria -- to have a real value to a company; not to be well-known and available to public; to be determined by the company; not to be a state secret; not to be under protection of the copyright or the patent law; not to be related to negative activities of the company which can damage state interests. Besides, the legislation determined a close list f information which cannot be considered a commercial secrecy, including foundation document, licenses, data on established reporting forms, payment documents, documents on payment capacity, as well as data on the company's membership, salaries and work conditions, number of job vacancies.

Any other information could be considered a commercial secrecy by a company and be protected in that capacity. That is why, a level of employer's confidence in fact that an important for the company information is unknown widely or for separate persons depends only on the first.   For the purpose to declare employee’s obligations not to disclose the commercial secrecy the employer has to undertake several actions. First, to determine and to write a list of data which is considered to be a commercial secrecy.  Second, to decide on measures to protect the information. Third, it is directly connected with an employee – to get him signed for acquaintance with the data and get written obligations on confidentiality. Those obligations can be also fixed in the labor contract or internal labor regulations.  As for the liability here we can talk about civil and corporeal liabilities within the labor law, as well as criminal liability for deliberate disclosure of the commercial secrecy which causes immense loses. In any case, to appeal the employee’s actions it is necessary to prove the fact of disclosure of the commercial secrecy, the employee’s fault, and, what is the most difficult, a volume of company’s damage.  In the Belarusian judicial practice there are single similar court cases.