When the Court of Justice of the European Union presented their preliminary ruling in the case C-131/12 (the Costeja-case) an EU wide principle was established appointing a responsibility for search engine companies to protect the personal data of individuals by, under certain circumstances, removing personal data from the list of search results. This has been referred to as “The right to be forgotten”.
This EU principle is now, for the first time, tried by Swedish Court. A Medical Doctor with practice in Malmö was subject to offensive comments on the internet forum Flashback. After several attempts in vain to have Google remove the links to the forum, the MD has been forced to initiate court proceedings at the District Court of Stockholm to uphold his right.
As legal counsel of the MD, the Gulliksson lawyer, Fredrik Engfeldt, looks forward to the judicial proceedings of the subject matter in this case. Since this particular situation and the preliminary ruling from the EU-court are both fairly new and untried phenomena, this case may become a pioneering case where we shall see how Swedish courts interpret the ruling from the EU-court.
For more info (in Swedish): http://www.dagensmedia.se/nyheter/dig/article3870152.ece
