The Federal Court dismissed one case, and referred another one to the European Court of Justice.
A right enforced ahead of GDPR: The Right To Be Forgotten (RTBF), which is now enshrined in the GDPR, stems from a ruling of the European Court of Justice of 2014, which found that EU citizens had the right to request search engines to remove "inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive" search results linked to their name. Since then, Google has removed search results, and provides a form for individuals to submit such removal requests.
The German Federal Court ruled on two cases: On 27 July 2020, the Federal Court in Germany examined two cases in which local courts had dismissed the stance of the claimants. In the first one, the managing director of a charity requested the delisting of links referring to the charity’s budget deficit of €1m in 2011 and to the director’s health condition at the time. The Court argued that the interests of the public, and of the content providers, need to be weighed up equally against the rights of the individual concerned, and that there is no automatic prevalence of the latter. In the second case, two individuals running a financial services company sought the removal of links to bad reports related to their investment model. Here, the Court stayed the proceedings and referred two questions to the European Court of Justice, which will now have to clarify aspects related to factually inaccurate claims, and to images included on a page even where the image search does not indicate the context in which the picture is placed.
Approaches to the RBTF vary widely: The German ruling comes two weeks after the Belgian data protection authority, the APD, fined Google €600k for not respecting the RTBF of a Belgian citizen, and for a lack of transparency in the request form to delist. While some links were in the public interest and should not be removed, others included information that was outdated, unsubstantiated, and could seriously damage the reputation of the citizen. The APD noted that the facts of the case were clear, leaving Google no reasonable room to decide otherwise.
