Efrén Díaz Díaz, lawyer and Senior Associate with Bufete Mas y Calvet in Madrid, Spain, presented on the topic “Google vs. Spain case: from the new right to be forgotten to the new European legislation on data protection“.
The attorney mandated in the case Google vs. Spain spoke on his experiences in the procedure and on the development of the right to be forgotten.
In his presentation Mr. Díaz laid out the history of the case in question and elaborated on the development of the arguments. He especially emphasized the technical background and backbone of his argumentation which eventually allowed him to convince not only the Spanish courts, but also the European Court of Justice. Mr. Díaz continued discussing the legal dimension and the dogmatic justification of the right to be forgotten to which he, in order to be technically more accurate and “less romantic”, preferred to refer as the right to be taken out of the search engine’s index or database. Concluding, Mr. Díaz put the right to be forgotten in the general context of digital rights, describing it as only one building block of a right to a digital identity.
The following open discussion touched upon other jurisdictions, especially such in South America, the hierarchy of rights concerned and the question whether the establishment of the right to be forgotten is part of a more general shift towards rights directed at private entities instead of the state.
Thank you very much to Mr. Díaz for this excellent presentation.
