Kieli
English
This factsheet has been prepared by the Registry of the European Court of Human Rights (“ECtHR”) and the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights as part of a collaborative effort to highlight jurisprudence in selected areas where European Union (“EU”) law and the law of the European Convention on Human Rights (“ECHR” or “the Convention”) interact.
The concept of a “right to be forgotten” has many facets and has been interpreted in a variety of ways. It first emerged in the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”), as an aspect of the right to privacy of data subjects in the context of processing of personal data. The CJEU provided an interpretation of the Data Protection Directive, emphasizing the fundamental rights granted by the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (“the Charter”). Further developments emerge in national jurisprudence and in the case-law of the ECtHR in the context of republication by the press of previously disclosed information of a judicial nature, with the person claiming a “right to be forgotten” effectively seeking to obtain a judgment against the person who republished the information. Subsequently, a new aspect of this right arose in the context of the digitisation of news articles, originally published in paper, following the online publication of digital archives. In such cases, the issue was less the resurfacing of the information but rather its continued availability online.