This article appeared as Chapter Five in "Towards an Internet Free of Censorship II Perspectives in Latin America"
Europe’s “Right to Be Forgotten” in Latin America
Executive Summary
This article addresses tensions between the so-called “Right to Be Forgotten” (RTBF) and Internet users’ free expression and information rights, particularly as those rights are recognized in Latin America. It reviews troubling developments based on two European legal sources: the Court of Justice of the European Union’s (CJEU) 2014 Google Spain case, which required the search engine to delist certain search results, and the EU’s pending General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The GDPR is a once-in-a-generation overhaul of EU Data Protection law. It will come into effect and displace previous Data Protection Law in 2018. Its new RTBF provisions tilt the playing field strongly in favor of erasing online speech, creating a serious imbalance between expression and privacy rights.
Latin American lawmakers and advocates have an opportunity to avoid this imbalance in their own laws. Indeed, there are strong arguments that the GDPR provisions could not pass legal and constitutional muster or comply with human rights commitments in the region. Lawmakers can robustly protect privacy and data protection rights without accepting the harm to speech from poorly designed RTBF laws.
The Article will (1) review the legal background of the RTBF in Europe, and its relationship to other notice and takedown regimes for online speech, (2) discuss the substantive and procedural restrictions to free expression under that law, with a focus on new provisions of the GDPR, and finally (3) identify important differences between relevant EU law and that of many Latin American countries.
The divergences between European and Latin American legal frameworks suggest the following possible approaches for policymakers grappling with RTBF proposals in legislation, litigation, or administrative enforcement:
• Not treating intermediaries as data controllers of speech posted by their users, or spelling out narrower controller obligations with respect to speech.
• Not emulating the removal process set forth in the GDPR, but instead drawing on intermediary liability law to identify any obligations and ensure procedural checks against over-removal.
• Vetting any RTBF proposals against Latin America’s unique and profree-expression human rights framework.
• Vetting any RTBF proposals against existing legal rights grounded in privacy, defamation, or other sources of law, then identifying whether RTBF would support claims not already covered in those laws, whether those new claims are desirable as a policy matter, and what carefully tailored free expression protections should apply to them.
- Publication Type:Academic Writing
- Publication Date:02/01/2017