European Court of Human Rights : Hurbain v. Belgium

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) found that a court order to anonymise an article in a newspaper’s electronic archive did not violate the publisher’s right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The judgment relates to the “right to be forgotten” as part of the right to privacy under Article 8 ECHR, in particular in respect of media archives (see also Iris 2013-9/1 and Iris 2018-8/1). The ECtHR held that the order to anonymise the name of a driver who had caused a fatal accident in the online archived version of an article published twenty years previously was justified from the perspective of Article 10 ECHR. The ECtHR however clarified that this finding could not be interpreted as involving an obligation for the media to check their archives on a systematic and permanent basis: the media are only required to do so and to weigh up the various rights at stake, when they receive an explicit request to that effect. This judgment is not final, as the case has been referred to the Grand Chamber on 11 October 2021