Right To Be Forgotten
The right to be forgotten is controversial because it allows search engines to remove links from online search results if people in Spain think that information about them has been unfairly publish.
Google alone has remove more than 1.1 million links in Spain since it introduce the controversial policy in August 2010, according to data from a joint study by the University of Alicante and the University of Granada Click here.
Court Of Justice
A joint study of data from August 2010 to March 2012 found that as many as 96 percent of link had been remove. The names of a third of those whose links were remove were deem to have no legal value under Spanish law, according to the report. However, according to the data, 496 people out of every 1,000 were affect.
However, on October 30, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that removing links does not constitute a “censorship” but rather is a private citizen’s right to privacy.
Spanish Court
Since the ruling, Spanish court have had to strike down the decision of local courts that order Google to remove link to new story, for example, as oppose to simply removing them from the top of the page.
However, several court are still trying to determine what the criteria for their decision should be. On June 12, the top Spanish court in Valencia upheld the right to be forgot law but rule that Spanish law had to be respect.
Interpretation
The right to be forgot stem from Europe’s right to be forgot directive, which was pass in 2014 by the European Union.
Several right-wing parties in Spain had argue that the law violate freedom of expression. In Spain, the court and lawmakers, by approving this law, have pass a very restrictive interpretation of the law,” Fali Gómez-Melchior, a law professor at the University of Alicante, told Al Jazeera.
Autonomous Region
Gómez-Melcher was one of two expert who work on the study of Spanish case law. The two others were María Dolores Sánchez and Manuel Bravo, experts from the University of Granada. The Catalan-led Cu political alliance, which previously govern the autonomous region, led a campaign against the law for its potential harm to economic and cultural relations with Europe.
Spain’s center-left PSOE party propose a plan on Tuesday that would allow for a more flexible implementation of the law, but the legislation was not expect to be pass by the full legislature before it goes into recess for elections later this year.
Issue
Internet freedom activist argue that the European Union has open the door to a new form of online censorship, particularly in the European Union. Our finding shows that Google and others have interpret the right to be forgot negatively Click here.
Campaigners for the right to be forgot “have totally misjudge this issue,” Gómez-Melcher said. What has emerge here in Spain is a massive power imbalance between private citizens and government. Lily Kuon, Laura Martínez and Jackie Chung contributed to this report. Click for Spanish , German , Dutch , Danish , French , translation- Note- Translation may take a moment to load.
