UK Lords slam EU’s right-to-be-forgotten ruling
31 Jul 2014
The EU's ''right to be forgotten'' ruling was ''unworkable, unreasonable, and wrong in principle'', a report by a committee of the House of Lords said.
Published today, the Lords' Home Affairs, Health and Education EU Sub-Committee's report slammed the court of justice of the EU for its ruling that firms such as internet search provider Google would need to remove outdated uncomplimentary information on people, if asked by them to do so.
According to the committee, not only was the ruling problematic, the 1995 directive on which it was based was itself out-dated, and called on the government to continue its fight to ensure that ''the updated Regulation no longer includes any provision on the lines of the Commission's 'right to be forgotten' or the European Parliament's 'right to erasure' ''.
''It is crystal clear that the neither the 1995 Directive, nor the CJEU's interpretation of it reflects the incredible advancement in technology that we see today, over 20 years since the Directive was drafted,'' said the committee chairman, Baroness Prashar.
''Anyone anywhere in the world now has information at the touch of a button, and that includes detailed personal information about people in all countries of the globe.''
The committee found the ruling ''unworkable'' for two reasons. The first, according to Prashar, was that ''it does not take into account the effect the ruling will have on smaller search engines which, unlike Google, are unlikely to have the resources to process the thousands of removal requests they are likely to receive.
''Secondly, we also believe that it is wrong in principle to leave search engines themselves the task of deciding whether to delete information or not, based on vague, ambiguous and unhelpful criteria, and we heard from witnesses how uncomfortable they are with the idea of a commercial company sitting in judgement on issues like that.''
The Lords committee has called on Google not to co-operate with the European Court of Justice ruling, which was 'unreasonable' and 'unworkable'.
Among 90,000 people who had demanded to have their past erased since May are paedophiles, doctors and politicians.
Google, which had agreed to over half the requests for deleting information, complained that it had to act as 'judge and jury'.
Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales said the ruling was a 'very dangerous path to go down'.
