Construction and Workplace Accidents

More than one person usually is

A construction site is the one workplace where the people present are almost never all employed by the same company. That is the reason the first question in a site accident is not what happened but who was in control of the part of the site where it happened.

• The employer of the injured person, whether that is the main contractor, a subcontractor or a labour agency
• The main contractor, where the condition that caused the injury was part of the site as a whole rather than of one trade's work
• Another subcontractor, where the work of one trade created the danger to another
• The owner or developer, depending on what was retained rather than passed on
• The supplier, hirer or maintainer of plant, scaffolding or equipment that failed

How responsibility is divided between those parties is usually written down before anybody is hurt, in the building contract and the sub-contracts. Those are agreements governed by the Contract Law, Cap. 149, and they are frequently the first documents we ask to see. What one company promised another about supervision, access, plant and site safety is evidence, whatever else it is.

The firm's guide to the key parties to a construction contract sets out who those parties usually are and what each of them is engaged to do.

The permit tells you who was supposed to be watching

Under section 9A(1) of the Streets and Buildings Regulation Law, Cap. 96, no permit concerning works provided for by that Law is implemented unless the appropriate authority is satisfied that the applicant has duly appointed a supervising engineer to supervise the execution of the works. There is an exception: for a work of limited scale and importance the authority may allow implementation without requiring the appointment, and what counts as such a work is defined by the Minister by order.

Section 9A(2) puts a duty on the owner of the work to inform the supervising engineer, in writing and in good time, of the date the works begin and of any suspensions along the way. Section 9A(3) puts two duties on the engineer who has accepted the supervision: not to assist in or tolerate the start of the work before satisfying himself that the permit exists, and to supervise the work at every stage of its execution until completion.

For an injured person those provisions are useful for a reason that has nothing to do with the building. The appointment is filed with the appropriate authority as a precondition of implementing the permit, so it is a record that exists independently of the contractor, and the permit file can be requested in writing under the Access to Information of the Public Sector Law 184(I)/2017, whose section 8(1) gives the applicant the right to be told whether the authority holds the information and to receive it where it does, subject to section 3(2), which takes personal data outside that Law and sends it to the data protection legislation instead. The owner's written notices are not filed there. They sit with the owner or the engineer, and in practice are obtained by specific discovery once proceedings have started.

Whether a supervising engineer owes a duty of care to a person injured on the site is a separate question. No Cypriot decision establishing such a duty was found. The engineer's role under Cap. 96 is directed at compliance with the permit and the Regulations, and establishing who that engineer was, and whether the permit position was in order at all, comes first.

Whether the permit position matters to the claim itself is answered by section 29 of Cap. 96. Breach of a duty imposed by that Law or its Regulations is a civil wrong under the Civil Wrongs Law as against any person who may suffer damage from the breach, and subsection (2) gives the injured person an actionable right, subject to the legal principles applying to actions for breach of statutory duty. Subsection (3) matters just as much: that liability cannot be limited or excluded by any contractual term, by any notice, or by any other provision. A clause in a building contract, or a sign at the gate, does not touch it.

None of that means the absence of a permit decides the case. The injured person still has to prove the causal link between the breach and the injury. What it does mean is that where works were carried out without the permit Cap. 96 requires, or otherwise than in accordance with it, that is a fact about the site worth establishing early. The firm's guide to building defects in Cyprus deals with the permit position in the context of the building itself.

The standard the employer is held to

Under section 13 of the Safety and Health at Work Law 89(I)/1996, every employer must ensure the safety, health and welfare at work of all their employees. The section then spells the duty out: safe plant, systems and methods of work; safe use, handling, storage and transport of articles and substances; a safe workplace, including the means of getting in and out of it; a safe working environment; and the taking and supervision of the protective measures the risks require.

One part of it deserves its own sentence. The employer must provide the information, instruction, training and supervision that safety requires from the employee's first working day, and in a language or form the employee understands. On a site where the workforce speaks four languages, whether the instruction was ever given in one the injured person reads is a question of fact, and it is asked.

The Law does not stop at the direct employer. Under section 16, a person who has control, to any extent, of premises made available as a workplace to people who are not their employees, or of the plant or substances in them, must take measures to ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, that they are safe, and a person who has taken on the maintenance or repair of the premises by contract or lease is treated as in control to the extent of that obligation. That is the provision that reaches beyond the employment relationship on a multi-employer site, and it is one more reason the contracts are asked for.

The courts have named the duty in the same terms. In Vrondis & Sons (Constructions) Ltd ν. Παπαλεοντίου, Civil Appeal 189/2011, 15 May 2017, the Supreme Court upheld a contractor's liability to an injured worker and stated the measure: the employer must take steps for a safe system of work, not vaguely or excessively but within reason in the light of the risks inherent in the undertaking, and a deficient system that exposes the employee to unnecessary risk breaches the duty. The frame is not historic: in Εργοληπτική Εταιρεία Ανδρέας Δημητρίου & Υιοί Λτδ ν. Σάββα, Civil Appeal 263/2016, 22 December 2025, a fall from a first floor into a septic pit, judgment went against the contracting company on exactly that ground.

The employee has duties too. Under section 15, every employee must take reasonable care for their own safety and that of others, cooperate with the employer, and use the protective equipment provided. When fault is argued against an injured worker, the questions that decide it are what equipment was actually provided, what instruction was actually given, and in what language: which is why those facts are recorded early. Under section 57 of the Civil Wrongs Law, Cap. 148, fault of the injured person does not defeat the claim; it reduces the damages by the share the court considers just. And the 2025 judgment above adds the point insurers prefer not to volunteer: where the worker was given no choice but to perform the dangerous task under the system the employer imposed, and no precaution the worker could have taken is even suggested, contributory negligence is not attributed at all.

Who answers for whom

Three provisions of the Civil Wrongs Law, Cap. 148, decide how responsibility travels upwards from the person who made the mistake.

Under section 13, an employer answers for what an employee does in the course of the employment: acts done in that capacity while performing the usual duties and those incidental to them, even where the act was an improper way of doing an authorised thing. Under section 12, a person who engages an independent contractor is generally not liable for the contractor's wrongs, with four exceptions that matter on every site: negligence in selecting the contractor, interference with the work in a way that caused the harm, authorisation or ratification of the act, and work that was itself unlawful. And under section 11, those who share responsibility for the same act are joint tortfeasors and may be sued together or separately, which is what the multi-defendant site claim rests on.

Where the thing that failed was under the defendant's control and the injured person has no way of knowing what went wrong, section 55 can shift the burden: if the court considers the event more consistent with a failure of reasonable care than with its exercise, it is for the defendant to prove there was no negligence. A scaffold that collapses is the classic case.

A site changes within hours

This is the category where the scene is most likely to be altered before anyone photographs it, and often for perfectly legitimate reasons.

Work resumes. The excavation is backfilled, the scaffold is struck and re-erected, the broken guard rail is replaced the same afternoon by a person acting entirely in good faith. None of that is concealment, and all of it destroys the thing that would have shown what the site looked like at the moment of the accident.

• Photographs of the exact location, taken before anything is moved, including what was underfoot and what was overhead
• The entry made in whatever accident record the site keeps, and any report sent to the employer, the main contractor or an authority
• The identity of the supervising engineer and the permit position, as above
• Recorded footage, where the site or the neighbouring property has cameras. This is the item most often lost, because systems commonly record over themselves within days, and a written request to preserve it changes what exists later
• The names, telephone numbers and nationalities of everyone who was present. Construction workforces move between sites and between countries, and a witness who is easy to find in week one can be impossible to find in month six
• Inspection, hire and maintenance records for any plant, lifting equipment or scaffolding involved
• The first medical record made after the injury, and every one after it

If you are still working on the site, ask for a copy of what was written down at the time rather than relying on being able to get it later.

What the claim covers, and the time you have

A claim is directed at the injury and at its documented consequences: the medical treatment, the effect on the work you can do, and the effect on the rest of your life. The heads of loss usually examined are set out in the firm's guide, Personal Injury Claims in Cyprus. What any individual claim is worth depends on the medical evidence and on documented loss, and cannot be estimated from the type of accident.

A claim for damages for personal injury must generally be brought within three years under the Limitation of Actions Law 66(I)/2012, and time usually runs from the date of the injury. Contract claims have six years, so if the site accident sits alongside a contractual dispute between companies, two different periods may be running at once on the same set of facts. Under section 6(2) the three years run from the day the cause of action was complete, or from the day the injured person came to know of the injury where that was later, which matters for the industrial conditions that declare themselves slowly. Section 27Α of the same Law suspends the limitation period for negligence and breach of statutory duty for thirty nine months from the day the 2021 amending law came into force, so the three years is not by itself the answer to whether a claim is in time.

A claim brought late is not always over. Section 6(3) gives the court a discretion, in a claim for bodily injury or death, to decide that the limitation provisions do not apply, weighing the reasons for the delay, how long the injured person was unable to deal with the case, what they did to obtain the material they needed, how the defendant responded, and what the delay has done to the evidence. It is a discretion and not an entitlement, and it cannot be exercised more than two years after the period expired.

Where the injury has left you unable to return to the same work, keep the record of what you earned before it, because that is the part of the claim that is proved on documents rather than on recollection.

And be careful what you sign while the claim is young. In P.S.T. Contractors & Developers Ltd v. Kozlowski, Civil Appeal 370/2017, decided on 16 December 2025, an employer met a site accident claim with a signed declaration said to release it from any further demand in return for €2,000. The trial court heard handwriting experts on both sides, found that the injured worker had never signed the document at all, and accepted him as a witness of truth; the Supreme Court left those findings undisturbed and dismissed the employer's appeal. The lesson cuts both ways: a release put in front of you after an accident deserves a lawyer's reading before a signature, and a release waved against you is examined, not assumed, because the dispute it creates is fought years later on credibility and expert evidence.