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Dominic McGoldrick, Developments in the Right to be Forgotten, Human Rights Law Review, Volume 13, Issue 4, December 2013, Pages 761–776, https://doi.org/10.1093/hrlr/ngt035
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Extract
1. Introduction
Human rights lawyers are familiar with the importance of the publication of historical information on gross and systematic human rights violations so that they will not be forgotten and will hopefully never happen again.1 In terms of international human rights law this approach is also reflected in requirements related to effective remedies and restrictions that human rights provisions impose on amnesties and on statutes of limitations for serious human rights violations.2 A newer phenomenon for human rights lawyers is the idea of a ‘Right to Be Forgotten’3 as an aspect of the right to privacy. Section 2 explains the European Commission’s 2012 Proposal for a Regulation on General Data Protection. Section 3 considers the Opinions of the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice in the Google Spain case on whether the operator of an Internet search engine should have the responsibilities of a controller of data protection. Section 4 assesses a 2013 judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in Węgrzynowski and Smolczewski v Poland in which that Court had to consider the protection of personal rights in a context of published material which continued to appear online. Section 5 appraises the implications of the material in Sections 2–4 for the development of the right to be forgotten.
