France passed the first law protecting an employee's right to ignore work messages outside contracted hours in 2017, and by 2026 more than fifteen countries have followed, though the EU itself still hasn't passed a single directive covering all of them

I know a few people who keep their phone permanently on silent, not just during meetings or at night, but as a fixed, unchanging setting they never turn off. I used to read that as a personality trait, a preference for calm over interruption. The more I looked into it, the more it started to look like something else too, a habit that a growing number of countries have quietly turned into an actual legal right, even if most people who practise it have never heard the phrase attached to it.

That phrase is the right to disconnect, and France got there first.

France started it

In 2016, France’s Loi Travail introduced what it called the droit à la déconnexion, taking effect the following year and requiring companies with 50 or more employees to negotiate specific rules about when staff could be contacted outside working hours, and to put those rules in a written charter. It didn’t ban out-of-hours contact outright, and it didn’t hand individual employees a personal veto they could invoke on the spot. It forced every sizeable employer to actually decide, on paper, through negotiation with staff representatives, what the boundary was supposed to be, rather than leaving it as an unspoken expectation that whoever answered fastest was the most committed. It also didn’t close the gap overnight: by 2021, roughly 60 percent of French employees working from home still said they had no formal right to disconnect in practice, whatever the law said on paper.

The rest of Europe followed, unevenly

Since then, the list has grown steadily rather than all at once. Italy and Spain followed within a couple of years. Portugal’s version, folded into its Labour Code in 2021, lets companies with ten or more staff be fined for contacting employees outside set hours. Belgium expanded its own law in October 2022, and by then had already given roughly 65,000 civil servants a formal right to disconnect after office hours. Cyprus came later, in November 2023, backed by fines of up to €10,000 for employers who don’t provide for it. By 2026, more than fifteen countries have some version of this on the books, each drawn up slightly differently, some as hard statutory rights, others as codes of practice with softer teeth.

Outside Europe, Australia took a noticeably different route. Rather than requiring companies to negotiate a written charter the way France does, its 2024 to 2025 reform gave employees a direct legal right to refuse unreasonable out-of-hours contact, with a workplace tribunal empowered to step in and rule on individual disputes over what counts as reasonable, weighing things like urgency, seniority, and how the person is compensated for being reachable. It’s a more adversarial model than the European negotiate-a-policy approach, closer to something an employee can actually invoke when a specific dispute arises rather than a general standard employers are simply expected to have written down somewhere.

Why there still isn’t one EU law

The European Parliament passed a resolution back in January 2021 calling for a single EU-wide directive, which would have turned this patchwork into one shared standard. It still hasn’t happened. In 2022, European trade unions and employer representatives spent fifteen months negotiating a binding agreement on the right to disconnect as part of a wider telework programme, and came close, only for the employers’ side to block the final unanimous sign-off. The European Commission is reportedly expected to propose a fresh framework directive on digital working conditions before the end of 2026, but even optimistic accounts don’t expect anything to actually take effect before 2027 or 2028. For now, whether you have a legal right to ignore a work message at nine at night still depends almost entirely on which country you happen to work in.

Does it actually change anything

Eurofound answered that question directly in a 2023 report surveying employees and HR managers across Belgium, France, Italy, and Spain. Over 70 percent of workers in companies with a right to disconnect policy rated its impact as very or somewhat positive, and workers at companies with such a policy reported suffering from stress or anxiety in the past year at a noticeably lower rate, 28 percent, compared with 38 percent at companies without one. Very high job satisfaction was about twice as common where a policy existed. The same report was careful to add that a policy on paper isn’t self-executing. Without awareness campaigns, training, and someone actually monitoring whether out-of-hours contact drops, the right tends to stay theoretical.

What I’d take from this

Someone who keeps their phone permanently on silent, in a country with no statutory protection at all, is essentially doing by hand what France, Belgium, and a dozen or so other countries have started doing by law: drawing a boundary around when they’re actually reachable, rather than leaving it open by default. I don’t think that makes the personal habit and the legal right the same thing, one is a private setting and the other is a negotiated, enforceable standard. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence either that so many people, working somewhere the law hasn’t caught up yet, have quietly built their own version of it into a phone setting nobody has to negotiate with them about.