Instead they've been spending their time studying the legal frameworks of intergovernmental organizations and investing money left to them by their deceased son Phillipe into reversing the diplomatic immunity of the European Space Agency, whose staff managers allegedly harassed Phillipe until he died by suicide 12 years ago.

Detailed by Supercluster in an earlier story, after years of fruitless efforts, the Kieffers landed their first small victory in January 2024 when the Paris Appeals Court overturned an earlier decision by the Paris High Court to not challenge the agency’s immunity protection. Specifically, the immunity of the ESA's alleged harassers.

The decision could create a crack in ESA’s seemingly impenetrable legal shell, which has for decades protected this European counterpart to NASA from external scrutiny. The battle, however, is not yet won as the taxpayer-funded agency, with an annual budget of more than 7 billion euro, has appealed against the decision in the Paris Supreme Court. The Kieffers told Supercluster they have low expectations of the Supreme Court’s deliberations as it had previously upheld ESA’s diplomatic immunity in a harassment case pursued by another former ESA staff member.

The case fought by Denise and Daniel Kieffer on behalf of their satellite engineer son is one of several brought over the years to courts in ESA’s member states by former employees alleging harassment or labor law breaches. Some of these cases were against ESA directly, others targeted contracting agencies that provide workers for ESA. All of them, the ex-workers claim, came up against ESA’s reluctance to cooperate with the investigators on the grounds of its diplomatic immunity. A claim that puts the agency outside of any national jurisdiction, granted to the ESA by its 1975 founding document, the Convention.

Three of those ex-workers agreed to speak with Supercluster publicly, detailing their exhausting legal battles with the agency they once considered the manifestation of their childhood dreams. The testimonies follow leaks of documents and anonymous allegations made to Ars Technica last year, which described widespread and ongoing problems with managerial harassment at the agency.

“I have tried to put everything that happened at ESA out of my mind, but I want to speak up because otherwise these things will continue forever,” Riccardo Biondi, an Earth observation scientist who worked at ESA’s Center for Earth Observation near Rome between 2006 and 2008, told Supercluster. Biondi was employed at ESA not as a direct staff member but as a contractor hired through a third-party company, which he requested not to be named due to concerns of legal retaliation.  

Formerly a research fellow at the University of Perugia who has since gone on to have a successful career in his field, Biondi fell out of favor of his managers at the contracting company and his ESA superiors after having taken part in a strike to support contractor colleagues whose jobs had been cut. He describes a campaign of mobbing and moral harassment that continued for weeks and months after the strike, and eventually led to him to seek opportunities elsewhere. 

“I had a contract that had to be renewed year by year because otherwise it would look like a permanent contract, which they didn’t want,” Biondi told Supercluster. “So, when my contract came up for renewal, my manager at [the contracting company] told me that ESA was not happy with me at all and that I was not good at my job. So, I said, fine, I’ll leave. But they didn’t want that. They gave me a new contract but there was a 20-day gap between my old and new contract, so that it didn’t look like a permanent contract in the face of Italian law.”

Soon after, Biondi’s ESA staff managers started coming up with tasks for him that were not in line with his job description, he said. Instead of doing science, Biondi was asked to copy hundreds of old tapes with satellite data and, using just his wheeled chair instead of a trolley, to transport these tapes from one office to another. He was also suddenly banned from using ESRIN’s sports facilities and not allowed to cross the premises in his jogging outfit during his lunch time run, he said.

Disheartened with the situation, Biondi looked for opportunities to move to another ESA establishment and was selected for another contractor role at ESA’s largest center, the European Space Research and Technology Center (ESTEC) in the Netherlands. But just as he was about to sign the new contract, the vacancy was scrapped, he said. He handed his notice to the Italian contracting company anyway but was told he could not leave before his contract ends despite a two-month notice period included in the terms of this employment agreement.

“They told me they would take me to court if I left,” said Biondi. “I said OK, and instead of waiting for two months, I left the next day. But then, they refused to pay my last salary. At the end, it was me taking them to court to get my money but also for the demotion I had been subject to.”

Although his case was primarily against the contracting company, the judge requested Biondi’s ESA staff managers to testify in court. Both had refused, citing their diplomatic immunity, said Biondi. But in a twist of events unlike those experienced by the Kieffer family, the judge disregarded the immunity and ordered them to testify anyway. Biondi easily won compensations for the denied salary, but eventually dropped the demotion case due to exhaustion and a desire to move on. 

“My lawyer told me that the demotion case was not worth fighting for because that’s something quite common in Italy anyway and even if I had won, I wouldn’t have gotten too much.”

Despite the decision in the Biondi case, ESA played the diplomatic immunity card again in 2019 when taken to court by another former ESRIN contractor, Ivan Balenzio. Balenzio, a communications professional employed through contracting company Kelly Services, worked at ESRIN for 15 years but was fired from his position in 2015 after suffering a burnout due to “a toxic work situation.” Balenzio’s dissatisfaction with ESA partly had to do with enormous salary differences between contractors and staff members performing similar tasks. Italian labor law guarantees workers employed through contracting companies the same conditions that staff members employed in similar roles enjoy. Inside ESA, however, the discrepancies were substantial.

“A colleague of mine who was a staff but doing essentially the same job was earning about a thousand euros per month more than me,” Balenzio told Supercluster. “And that didn’t seem right. The District Court in Velletri ruled in Balenzio’s favor and ordered ESA and Kelly Services to pay Balenzio 210,000 euros in compensation. An appeals court later decreased the amount. 

Judges in both trials, however, faced ESA’s lukewarm attitude to cooperating with the investigation on the grounds of its diplomatic immunity. In the run-up to the first hearing, the agency even sent an official “nota” to the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, requesting that the Ministry ensure “Italian judicial authorities at the Court of Velletri respect the immunity from jurisdiction” granted to ESA by its 1975 founding Convention. Supercluster has seen and confirmed the nota.

The Convention grants ESA and its staff members immunity from jurisdiction “in respect of acts, including words written and spoken, done by them in exercise of their function.” This immunity remains in place even “after [the staff members] have left the service of the Agency.” These workers also “enjoy inviolability for all their official papers and documents,” the Convention states. Equally “inviolable” are ESA’s premises located in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, the U.K. and Belgium. 

Intergovernmental organizations, such as ESA, are protected by diplomatic immunity to prevent any sovereign state from excessively interfering in the organizations’ internal matters. ESA’s Convention, however, states that the agency’s Director General has a duty to lift the agency’s immunity in all cases where “reliance upon it would impede the course of justice and it can be waived without prejudicing the interests of the Agency.”

In the agency’s nearly 50-year history, that decision, however, has never been taken, ESA told Supercluster in an earlier email.

“During my trials, the judges said that the immunity cannot be applied in my situation as the case had nothing to do with ESA’s internal autonomy,” said Balenzio. “But it was clear that although ESA said it intended to cooperate, it was quite hard to obtain from them even basic documents that would show the salary differences.”

After his victory, Balenzio spoke to Italian media. While discussing his experience, he mentioned his belief that he may have been discriminated against as a homosexual man, and described perceived homophobic remarks he had been subject to from some ESA staff members during his time at the agency. 

“It was mainly jokes, comparisons, references,” he told the Italian website Open in December 2019. “One thing I will never be able to forget is that during the parties organized after the various communication events, my boss constantly told me ‘homosexuals drink prosecco’. Repeated several times it seemed like a personal attack to me."

ESA, Balenzio told Supercluster, “didn’t like it.”

In a letter sent to Balenzio’s lawyer in April 2020 and seen by Supercluster, Turin-based law firm Musy Bianco and Associates, writing “on behalf of the European Space Agency,” threatened Balenzio with legal action for his claims about homophonic harassment.

“ESA is verifying the effects of the behavior you have carried out - and it goes without saying of those that you further carry out in defiance of this warning - and reserves in this regard every initiative suitable for the protection of its rights, including as compensation for damages,” the letter signed by Paolo Bianco, reads.

ESA confirmed to Supercluster the existence of this letter, saying that Balenzio was “making false allegations that could prejudice ESA’s reputation” and that Balenzio had “not been the victim of homophobic harassment at ESA.”

Balenzio appealed to Italy’s Supreme Court against the decision of the Appeals Court, which reduced the amount owed to him by ESA and Kelly Services. 

Speaking to Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, ESA’s head of legal services Marco Farrazzani said that the discrepancies in Balenzio’s salary were due to “mistakes” made by Kelly Services, through which Balenzio was employed at ESA. 

For the Kieffer family, the most relevant case is that of former rocket engineer Nathalie Pottier who lost her war against ESA’s diplomatic immunity in 2016 when the French Supreme Court ruled that ESA’s internal procedures were solid and included "guarantees of impartiality and fairness,” a claim that the Kieffers, Pottier and other past staff members who have attempted to address their grievance through ESA’s internal mechanism, strongly disagree with.

Because of its special status that puts it out of reach of any national jurisdiction, ESA is obliged to have an internal court that simulates the function of a justice system. Its Administrative Tribunal consists of six judges paid by the agency and appointed by its council. This tribunal only deals with disputes involving staff members and not contractors and doesn’t have a provision for appeals. It is also unable to rule on requests to overthrow the Director General’s decision not to lift immunity of ESA’s staff members. For this reason, the Paris Appeals Court agreed that justice had been denied in the Kieffer case and requested the first court reexamine its decision to not challenge ESA’s refusal to lift immunity in the investigation of Philippe’s suicide. The precedent set in the Pottier case, however, suggests that ESA may still have a final victory.

Pottier, a former rocket engineer with degrees from Paris and Moscow and microgravity and missiles research experience from the U.S., spoke to Supercluster about her experience. Once tipped by some to become France’s next astronaut, she was hired by ESA as a launcher engineer in 2005 to work on the agency’s Soyuz launcher program at the European Spaceport in Kourou.

Pottier claims she was subject to a sustained campaign of moral harassment by her superiors after raising a security issue and refusing to sign-off documents due to concerns. Similarly to Biondi, she perceived that she was being punished for her refusal to comply by being stripped of her engineering duties and instead being given tasks well below her qualification levels.

“My role as a launch engineer was reduced to ordering pins, models, studies of model bases, quotes for paperclips in the shape of a Soyuz rocket, and checking my supervisor’s and colleague’s English writing,” she said.

Similar reduction of responsibilities was also reported by colleagues witnessing the treatment of Phillipe Kieffer prior to his suicide, according to legal documents in the case.

Pottier believes she was disqualified from ESA’s 2008 astronaut selection in retaliation for complaining about her treatment by her superiors. She left ESA in 2010, two years before Kieffer hanged himself in his house in Leiden, the Netherlands, near ESTEC premises.

ESA told Supercluster that it had “cooperated at all times with the judicial authorities of the Member States concerned – the Netherlands and France – in order to facilitate the proper administration of justice” in the investigation of Kieffer’s suicide and that “a number of ESA staff members were called as witnesses” by the French investigating judge “during the inquiry, which spanned some ten years.”

The agency also maintains that Kieffer was not a victim of harassment although its internal tribunal ruled the cause of his suicide as work-related. The allegations by Biondi, Balenzio and Pottier, as well as those by the Kieffer family, seem supported by the results of a recent internal harassment survey leaked to Ars Technica in December. The survey found that one in five ESA workers had experienced perceived harassment in the workplace in the last two years.

ESA insists it has cutting-edge anti-harassment policies in place.