If worldwide, it will become global censorship some say

Sep 11, 2018 13:19 GMT  ·  By

ECJ (European Court of Justice) which is the supreme court of the EU in matters of European Union law, will decide today in Luxembourg if the famous "right to be forgotten" concept should be applied by search engines on a global scale.

In 2014, ECJ ruled that the "right to be forgotten" applies to all search engines, with an immediate effect that they need to remove links from their search results if they connect to information which an EU citizen wants to be forgotten.

The "right to be forgotten" had come into discussion in 2009, when a Spanish citizen wanted to have all the information regarding an auction related to a social security debt he accrued in 1998 removed from Google's search results.

His request ended up in the hands of the AEPD (the Spanish data protection authority) which, after consulting ECJ, decided that Google as the processor of the Spaniard's data should be the one taking action and remove it from their results, and not the newspaper that initially published the info about the real estate auction.

The "right to be forgotten" can become a dangerous tool in the hands of censors

Today, in Luxembourg, ECJ will decide if the "right to be forgotten" should be applied by search engines worldwide and not only within the limits of the Europan Union.

Although such a measure might be celebrated by some, there are enough voices  (i.e., free speech organizations) saying that such a ruling might transform this concept into a global censorship weapon.

Such a tool could allow government actors to hide information not only from their own country's part of the Internet but the eyes of the entire world, making it very easy to remove any content deemed unfit for the public eye in a blink of an eye.

“If European regulators can tell Google to remove all references to a website, then it will be only a matter of time before countries like China, Russia and Saudi Arabia start to do the same. The [ECJ] should protect freedom of expression, not set a global precedent for censorship," told Thomas Hughes, the executive director of Article 19, a human rights organization, according to The Guardian.