A ruling has been issued that a person who is punished for murder in Germany has a right to be forgotten.
The right to be forgotten is the right to request that we erase your information as it is retrieved from the Internet. The right to request that Internet users not display posts posted on social network services (SNS) or portal boards such as Facebook or Twitter.
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The British public broadcaster BBC reported Friday that the German Constitutional Court admitted that a German convicted of murder 37 years ago had the right to remove his name from online search results.
According to the BBC, the German was sentenced to life in 1982 for killing two people on a yacht. He was later served in prison and released in 2002.
The German magazine Spiegel wrote the article in 1982 and 1983 and stored it on their servers in 1999, when the Internet became popular. The real name of the murderer, a German man, is written exactly as it is, so a simple Google search can find the article.
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The German man came to know the article in 2009 and insisted on the right to be forgotten. He claimed that past articles have violated his privacy rights and hindered his personality.
The case was initially dismissed by the German Federal Court in 2012. The federal court then ruled that the right to privacy did not outweigh the public's right to freedom of speech and freedom of speech.
But the German Constitutional Court reversed the decision and sent the case back to the federal court. The Constitutional Court found that the EU's right to forget is stronger than the federal court's decision.
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The Constitutional Court said, however, that an individual could not assert the right to be forgotten unilaterally, and that the decision would take into account how long after the crime. In this case, 37 years have elapsed since the initial decision.
The ruling, the BBC said, would allow the press to leave the article online, but it could force the article to be removed if requested.
The BBC also pointed out that the 'right to forget' issue is controversial and is now spreading to disputes between the EU and Google. This may be seen as a conflict between Europe, which values individual privacy and dignity, and a global IT company that prioritizes freedom of expression.
In 2014, the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the EU's highest court, ruled that search engines should remove search results based on public interest when requested by an individual. At the time, a Spanish lawyer had found an article online that had been auctioned off his home in the past and asked him to remove it, and the court raised his hand.
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In response, however, in the same court, ECJ, Google derived a ruling in September that the ruling, which guarantees the right to be forgotten, applies only to search results in Europe. At the time, Google claimed that if the removal request was applied outside of Europe, it could be used for human rights violations by the dictatorship.