UK opposes EU's right to be forgotten ruling

Even as the UK government this week prepared to quietly pass a beefed-up emergency surveillance legislation to allow phone tapping and online communications interception on a massive scale (See: UK to pass emergency laws for phone, internet surveillance), it slammed a pan-European threat to freedom of information.

The legislation had acquired an urgency due to the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the highest legal authority in the EU, ruling that telcos and internet companies did not have to keep records of calls, texts and emails.

Prime Minister David Cameron is chairing a session of the cabinet at Downing Street later today to make the case for emergency laws, that would only run through to 2016 to restore the right of the police and security services to get access to online data.

The new laws, having cross-party support, would be pushed through Parliament next week.

However, even as privacy rights were being eroded through the measure, at the same time the UK government was taking a stand against the ECJ ruling, the so-called Right to be Forgotten which came into force in May (See: Users can demand to be 'forgotten' by Google, rules top EU court).

Under the laws EU citizens are able to demand removal of search engine links to things that the complainant would rather not have on public view – murder charges, corruption convictions, paedophilic tendencies among others.

Meanwhile, the government insisted that there was no such thing as a right to 'be forgotten' online.

According to justice minister Simon Hughes people did not have an 'unfettered' right to demand the removal of links to internet articles containing information about them.

Huges likened the ruling to Communist China which had been criticised for "closing down people's right to information."

The removal of search results applied to Google's local search pages covering the EU's 28 member nations and four other European countries, comprising around 500 million people (See: Google starts removing some search results in EU).

However users in Europe switching to the firm's US domain, Google.com, would find unaltered search results.

The 'right to be forgotten' was based on the premise that outdated information about people should be removed from the internet after a certain time.

However, after Google followed through with the judgment last week in some instances, it started reinstating some of them (Also see: Google reinstates some links removed under 'right to be forgotten' law).

Hughes told members of the House of Lords Home Affairs Committee that to suggest there was a right to be forgotten was not 'accurate or helpful.

He added, "Clearly in the modern world that we live in there are many challenges about how you balance data protection and freedom.

"In many ways you could say we are at a crossroads and the very fact that this got to the European Court shows that."