A Debt Notice That would Not Die
In 1998, a short legal notice appeared in the Spanish newspaper, La Vanguardia, concerning the auction of a man's property for a debt, Mario Costeja González. The notice was correct, legally published and really, really nothing special. That is, up until over 10 years later when anyone would look him up on Google, that's what they would find first. The debt had been well paid. Presumably the notice had not been issued. Google was asked to remove the link by González. Google resisted on the grounds that it was just indexing material created by other people and wasn't responsible for them. The case ended up before the Court of Justice of the European Union, which in May 2014 ruled in his favour, not by deleting anything from the newspaper, but by holding that the search engines can be made to be accountable for the way they bring out old, irrelevant content when when people type their names in a search bar. With that one case, Google Spain SL v. AEPD and Mario Costeja González, the world was given a phrase which has been debated since: The right to be forgotten. Each side of that argument inevitably runs into another, the right to remember. It is the basis of the profession of the journalist. Historians make careers out of it! It is striven for by survivors of atrocities and families across generations, at great personal cost. There is no neat resolution to this question in law; and the debate has never been more intense than in India in the past 12 months, with two decisions, made within just a few months of one another in 2026, instantly making the question far more real than ever before.
What “The Right to Be Forgotten” Really Means
The term is overshadowed by its common usage and it's important to make it clear what it doesn't mean. It's not to say that someone cannot remove history from memory or make people forget unpleasant things about him or her in the online world. The Google Spain ruling in fact was narrower, and much more clever: it said that if information about a person has become outdated, irrelevant or excessive since the search engine's last indexing of his name, the person could request that the specific link be removed from the search engine's results and that
the link to the original information remain in place, whether on the newspaper's own site or on any other site. The easiest way to think about it: The book remains on the library shelf. The library simply doesn't push any new customer in any direction except towards its most awkward section of the book, unless they are specifically seeking it. The EU directly incorporated this into the law four years later. Article 17 of GDPR, which comes into effect in 2018, establishes a right of erasure (also known as ‘right to be forgotten’) that allows individuals to request that organizations remove their personal data if it is no longer necessary, when consent has been
withdrawn or when it was collected unlawfully in the first place. The exceptions for freedom of expression, journalism, legal obligations, and the public interest, however, are very generous, and the article is immediately followed by examples of such exceptions. The right was not originally intended to be absolute. It was intended to be debated case by case and indeed that is how it has been done since then, all the way down to the Court later clarifying that Google need only delist results in the EU, not globally.
The Case for Remembering
It is common for the opposing principle to never be given one slogan or catch phrase, but international human rights law has somehow subtly come up with one, at least in the darkest of circumstances. It grew out of Latin America military dictatorships where families were asking for answers for as long as decades for what happened to their loved ones who just disappeared. The right to truth, both as a collective right, a society's right to an honest account of its history, and an individual's right to know, surfaced in regional human rights courts later and eventually came to be understood as a right that both individual families and their wider societies have to
the truth of what happened and who was responsible. It is a day celebrated every 24 March by the United Nations, which is dedicated to "truth" and commemorates a Salvadoran Archbishop who died for demanding no less. The rationale is simple: societies who have the opportunity to forget atrocities, will repeat them or will state that they never occurred. This "little brother" or "little sister" of the journalism instinct, that yesterday's reporting wouldn't just disappear
quietly if involved parties wanted it to, is what everyday journalism operates on. American courts have embraced this argument, and done so to the contrary of European courts. A federal appeals court told an actress that American law doesn't recognize such a right when she sought to get Google to remove a film clip she deeply regretted being in. Even a state law that was expressly aimed at allowing people to remove old, dismissed criminal charges from official records was considered a fundamentally different type of action from what a free press is doing when it reports on the matter. Place the two principles on a collision course and the collision is immediately apparent. One person claims that there are some things that should go out of fashion. The other says that certain things have to .
India's Long, Uneven Road
India received a decent solution from an empty man. It has been a slow process of development, one by one, more or less by chance. It started with the Supreme Court's landmark privacy judgment in 2017 in the case of Justice K.S. Puttaswamy vs Union of India wherein a nine-judge bench had declared that the right to privacy is a fundamental right that has emanated from the right to life and the right to personal liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution. There was no claim on the right to be forgotten about there at all; the issue was the Aadhaar identity scheme. But on the way, the Court has encapsulated the entire issue in such an arresting comment that it has since been echoed in many RTBF judgements: the internet cannot forget, and the internet doesn't let anyone forget. In another separate opinion, Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul took it further, suggesting that people should be able to have the information deleted once it is no longer "necessary", no longer "relevant" or simply "incorrect". The answer to this open question was given, petition by petition, by various High Courts for about a decade, in
all but different manners. The Gujarat High Court in 2015 rejected an acquittal set aside from a public legal database and ruled that court records are public property and that it did not have any law to rule on the petitioner's request. Two years later, in a case that had to do with a young woman's name being mentioned in her
father's criminal case, the Karnataka High Court looked more lenient and merely removed her name from the published order, without interfering with the judgment. The Delhi High Court, in 2019, that heard a controversy relating to the MeToo movement, referred to the right to be let alone as an umbrella term for the right to be forgotten. It went a lot further by 2021, when it ordered a long pending case involving the narcotics conviction of a foreign national who had followed him to job applications overseas to be anonymised on India's widely-used legal database Kanoon. In the same year, the Madras High Court similarly reached this conclusion
for a rape defendant acquitted that same year and had his name removed from the judgment in that case which was affirmed by one of the Court's Division Benches in 2024. In 2022, the Kerala High Court had come out with an entirely different verdict, ruling that open justice cannot be given a whipping-down to suit the comfort of one individual. All the time, Parliament progressed more slowly than the courts. It does provide individuals a right to rectification and deletion of their personal data from companies and other organisations involved in data
processing, but that right is tailored to the context of commercial data processing and not to court decisions, news archives, or anything a journalist has ever published. However, the more people petitioned the courts, the more they felt the law was inadequate. Two years ago, ask an Indian law student who is the country's foremost advocate for the right to be forgotten and the honest answer was that there was no one, but rather a disjointed, sometimes conflicting series of High Court rulings and a pending appeal that had been pending before the Supreme Court since 2024 and that has been sitting on the bench since it halted a Madras High Court order
requiring Indian Kanoon to remove an entire judgment from the internet. It's happened twice, almost back-to-back, in early 2026, and both changes are going in opposite directions which
is where the partnership comes in handy. But it was a very different case the Supreme Court was involved in in February 2026. One of India's most closely watched defence-corruption sagas, the man who was discharged in the AgustaWestland scandal has asked a trial court, and later the Delhi High Court, to remove truthful news reports and original court records from the pages of The Indian Express and Indian Kanoon, claiming he had the right to be forgotten. Both orders were stayed by the Supreme Court. The Court said its discomfort was palpable: a discharge can't wipe away an entire public record of corruption however much that might be
desirable to the person the discharge's for. This piece was accompanied by the ruling three months later. Justice Sachin Datta of Delhi High Court delivered a comprehensive judgement of 144 pages in Laksh Vir Singh Yadav v Union of India in nearly four decades of pending cases, with individuals acquitted of crimes or discharged from matrimonial proceedings or
simply burdened by search results based on cases that had long been closed. Google and Indian Kanoon are constitutionally bound, under Article 21, to de-index such judgements, and the Court had introduced a concept that is novel to Indian jurisprudence taken from Germany's constitutional court, which recognised an individual's right to control the flow of information concerning his personal information. But care was taken to make it clear what this relief does and doesn't do, in this instance the underlying record remains in exactly the
same place it already is; it can be located by case number, citation, or court by anyone who will bother to look. It is not the judgment that goes away. It's the quick way to it.
The two stay and judgment in February and May are not contradictory at all, but rather the same principle tested at its two extremes. The Delhi High Court's decision safeguards the rights of the common man to a case that has been settled and is not to be the first search result in future. The Supreme Court’s stay was not handed to a man entangled in a big defence case to erase the whole of a newspaper’s reporting. One is dignity protection. The other would have been the erasure of accountability, put up in the words of dignity. That separation between silencing a search result and eradicating a public record is perhaps the most useful concept to emerge from this entire space, and appears to have been picked up by Indian courts almost unconsciously, much before any legislation by Parliament. The Delhi High Court has its own balancing framework, with listing out of the variables that matter in each case: Seriousness of the original allegations, the outcome of the case, duration of time elapsed, the existence of a ‘live’ public interest, and the significance of the person's own public role. There's no need to remember anything literally. It simply needs to be determined who shall have to go looking. None of this answers the question and commentators on the May 2026 judgment have been blazing with their reasons. In practice, it remains unclear how an ordinary citizen would apply for one of these masking orders,and how quickly courts are expected to grant such requests, since the harm they are meant to prevent is continuing as more of these searches are delayed. Database resources such as Indian Kanoon are being invited to create completely new technical solutions to selectively block access to records based on name search while at the same time retaining them fully accessible by citation searches. All of this is quite a large engineering challenge. Nobody has yet been able to give a clear response to the biggest practical question yet: what would be the consequences if the search engine is operated entirely outside India, so it's not possible for an Indian court to issue an order to them? This is built on the underlying, unspoken debate this piece originally contained. The concept of the right to be forgotten is that time should heal a reputation, if only the record wouldn't be shouting about it. The right to remember is that some records should not be allowed to be mercilessly silenced. Not so much surprisingly, India
is now trying to create a structure for respecting both instincts at the same time, instead of choosing one or the other, and then coding it into a statute that can endure ad infinity like the GDPR did for the EU, or the United States just hasn't, even if its decades of free-speech precedent has led it to believe otherwise. In all of these cases, the question is the same: Who will tell the story of who, what, or everybody else who has something to remember? We're coming to the conclusion the law is reaching modestly and incrementally that neither side is entirely successful. But what a good system of law can provide is a rule that no one has to go
looking for the past to come look uninvited and unglamorous, as that sounds, but, in the best of all possible worlds, it may be the best that either law can claim.
