Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Compliance

German Court Backs Murderer’s ‘Right to be Forgotten’

A man convicted of murder 37 years ago has the right to be forgotten and have his name removed from online search results, Germany’s highest court ruled on Wednesday.

The constitutional court in Karlsruhe found in favour of a man who was given a life sentence for killing two people on a yacht in 1982.

A man convicted of murder 37 years ago has the right to be forgotten and have his name removed from online search results, Germany’s highest court ruled on Wednesday.

The constitutional court in Karlsruhe found in favour of a man who was given a life sentence for killing two people on a yacht in 1982.

The man, who was released from prison in 2002, is now fighting to distance his family name from reports about the case.  

The decision could mean publications are forced to restrict search engine access to their online archives in such cases.

His full name still appears in online searches as part of an archived article in German weekly Der Spiegel.

His case was initially rejected by a federal court in 2012 on the basis that his right to privacy did not outweigh public interest and press freedom. 

But Germany’s highest court has now thrown out that initial ruling, meaning his case will now return to the federal courts.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

Yet the court also insisted that individuals could not unilaterally claim a right to be forgotten and that its decision had been influenced by the amount of time that had passed since the crime. 

The “right to be forgotten” has been the subject of a longstanding legal dispute involving Google and the EU.  

In 2014, a European Court of Justice ruling forced search engines to comply with requests to remove results. 

Google hit back last September when the same court ruled that the right to be forgotten only applied to search results in Europe. 

In a separate case, the German constitutional court ruled against a woman campaigning to have the transcript of a TV programme from 2010 removed from searches of her name. 

In the TV show, the woman had been accused of treating employees unfairly. The court described her complaint as “unfounded”.

Written By

AFP 2023

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

SecurityWeek’s Threat Detection and Incident Response Summit brings together security practitioners from around the world to share war stories on breaches, APT attacks and threat intelligence.

Register

Securityweek’s CISO Forum will address issues and challenges that are top of mind for today’s security leaders and what the future looks like as chief defenders of the enterprise.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cybercrime

Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group informed some customers last week that their online accounts had been breached by hackers.

Cybercrime

As it evolves, web3 will contain and increase all the security issues of web2 – and perhaps add a few more.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.

Cybercrime

Zendesk is informing customers about a data breach that started with an SMS phishing campaign targeting the company’s employees.

Artificial Intelligence

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 has demonstrated the potential of AI for both good and bad.

Artificial Intelligence

The degree of danger that may be introduced when adversaries start to use AI as an effective weapon of attack rather than a tool...