The House of Lords has slammed the EU ruling establishing a ‘right to be forgotten’ as ‘wrong in principle’

The European Union’s “right to be forgotten” ruling is “unworkable, unreasonable, and wrong in principle”, according to a report by a committee of the House of Lords.

Published on Wednesday, the Lords’ Home Affairs, Health and Education EU Sub-Committee’s report strongly criticised the court of justice of the European Union for its ruling, which created a requirement for firms such as internet search provider Google to remove outdated information.

The committee argued that not only was the ruling problematic, the 1995 directive it was based on is itself out-dated, and calls 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 gave two main reasons for finding the ruling “unworkable”. The first, according to Prashar, is 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.”

In early July, Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales weighed in against the CJEU, warning that Google must not be left to “censor history”.

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