France’s privacy watchdog has gone farther than most in demanding that the Google ruling be expanded beyond the borders of the European Union | Loic Venance/AFP via Getty Images French court refers Google privacy case to ECJ The decision represents the latest turn in the often-heated debate around the so-called ‘right to be forgotten.’

Google won a reprieve Wednesday after one of France’s highest courts asked European judges to decide whether the tech giant should apply a privacy ruling across all of its search requests worldwide.

The decision represents the latest turn in the often-heated debate around the so-called “right to be forgotten,” an earlier privacy ruling from the European Court of Justice that allows people in Europe to demand that search engines remove links to content about themselves, with some limitations, from online search requests.

The debate has pitted privacy campaigners, who want to give individuals greater control over information about themselves online, against freedom of speech advocates, who claim removal of links to digital content is a form of censorship.

On Wednesday, France’s Conseil d’État, the country’s highest administrative court, said it asked the European Court of Justice to determine whether search engines such as Google and Microsoft’s Bing must apply the "right to be forgotten" decision to their search domains outside of the European Union. Those sites would potentially include google.com.

If Europe’s highest court rules that it should not be applied globally, the Conseil d’État said the ECJ would then determine how the "right to be forgotten" should be applied within Europe.

In response, Google said each country should be able to determine what information could be accessed by its citizens online, and that there needed to be a balance between people’s right to privacy and freedom of expression.

“We look forward to making our case at the European Court of Justice,” Peter Fleischer, the company’s global privacy counsel, said.

A decision by Europe’s highest court would likely not be made until 2019, at the earliest.

Whatever happens at the ECJ, analysts say it may prove difficult for any European court to enforce the ruling outside of the region, potentially allowing Google to continue providing unfettered search requests to people not in Europe.

While many of Europe’s data protection authorities have pushed Google to expand the scope of the “right to be forgotten” decision, France’s privacy watchdog — the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) — has gone farther than most in demanding that the ruling be expanded beyond the borders of the European Union.

Last year, the CNIL fined Google €100,000 for failing to apply the privacy ruling across all of its global domains, including google.com, a ruling that the company subsequently appealed to the Conseil d’État. A representative for the CNIL was not immediately available for comment on Wednesday.

Since the "right to be forgotten" decision was first announced in 2014, Google has taken several steps to appease European regulators, including the removal of some links to online content from all of its domains, including google.com, that are viewed by people within Europe.

So far, the company has approved roughly 43 percent of people’s privacy takedown requests, equivalent to almost 800,000 links to digital content, according to Google’s latest transparency report.

France remains the country where people have made the most requests, according to the company’s report, followed by Germany and the United Kingdom.

The French privacy decision against Google comes less than a month after the search giant was hit by a record €2.4 billion fine for breaking the European Union’s antitrust rules related to some of its search services.