The Strasbourg Court has validated the decision of the Belgian Justice, which agreed with a man who demanded that his name not appear in an online information from the archives of the newspaper Le Soir in which his responsibility for a car accident was reported. deadly traffic in 1994.
The European judges, in a sentence published this Tuesday, reject the demand of Le Soir, who considered that freedom of expression was being restricted by forcing an anonymous formula in that information to refer to the person responsible for that accident, in which two died. people and three others were injured.
The man, who is a doctor, finished serving his sentence in 2000 and benefited from rehabilitation in 2006, he does not want to be linked to that accident in an internet search in the name of his right to be forgotten, and for this reason two years after the newspaper put its historical archives online, he claimed the disappearance of his name.
The Belgian Justice agreed with him and that is why the editor of Le Soir, Patrick Urbain, appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, which emphasizes the “serious harm” for the driver because the article creates a kind of “judicial precedent virtual”.
For the Strasbourg judges, after weighing the rights of both parties, forcing anonymous treatment of the driver does not suppose “an exorbitant and excessive burden” for the newspaper, while for the former it is “the most effective measure for the protection of your private life.
Above all, they insist that their decision does not open a jurisprudence that would allow certain information in the files to be amputated, but that it responds to an analysis of the particular context.
In this specific case, they point out that the events reported in the article did not receive media coverage, that the doctor was not a public person, that the dissemination of his name did not contribute any added value to the general interest or contribute to a public debate on road safety, nor did it have a historical dimension.
The driver did not carry out any public function that would justify his exposure – his profession as a doctor does not change things – and his behavior both at the time of the accident and when he demanded that his name be withdrawn 16 years later, showed that he wanted to keep his distance from any advertising.
However, if your identity were to remain in that article in the archives, anyone who did a search on Le Soir or a search engine like Google – such as your patients, your colleagues or anyone you know – would find the information from 1994 and that could stigmatize you. , seriously affect his reputation and “deprive him of the possibility of re-socializing normally”.
The ECHR emphasizes that this does not imply a right to rewrite or falsify history and that ultimately the paper files of Le Soir remain, where the full name appears.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
