HURBAIN v. BELGIUM JUDGMENT for that of the domestic courts and to disregard the outcome of the balancing exercise carried out by them. B. The parties’ submissions 1. The applicant 137. In his submissions to the Grand Chamber the applicant maintained that the order for him to anonymise the article in question amounted to interference that had not been necessary in a democratic society. He pointed out that the present case concerned digital press archives, the aim of which, in his submission, was to preserve all the information in an exhaustive manner for future generations. Accordingly, the passage of time could not be taken into consideration in determining whether or not there had been interference. Thus, in the applicant’s view, the purpose of journalistic archiving was not limited in time. 138. The applicant submitted that six main characteristics distinguished the present case: (a) the lawful nature of the archived material, as its accuracy was not disputed; (b) the nature of the online document, which was an archived item rather than a current news report; (c) its consequences, as archives were intended to be kept over time, even if they had an impact on the right of the person concerned to protection of his or her reputation; (d) the fact that publishers were required to verify whether the accessibility of the archived material had a disproportionate impact on the claimant’s right to privacy, not at the time when the information was disseminated but at the time of the request for anonymisation; (e) the status of the person concerned, in this case a private individual who was a member of a liberal profession (a doctor); and (f) the fact that the person concerned had not requested the search engines to delist the archived material. In the light of these characteristics, the threshold set by the criteria established in Axel Springer AG was so low that any individual mentioned in archived material could claim entitlement to have the material anonymised. In the applicant’s submission, the criteria employed by the Court should take into account the specific features of the protection of digital archives. 139. The applicant argued that the integrity of the archives was an essential criterion in balancing the rights at stake and that the case went to the very essence of the media’s mission. In his view, the role of archives was to ensure the continued availability of information that had been published lawfully at a certain point in time, and they must therefore remain authentic, reliable and complete. Since archiving was one of the functions of the press (a secondary one, but nevertheless of undoubted importance, as accepted by the Court), and was thus to be equated with the processing of data for journalistic purposes, the erasure of journalistic information faced a major obstacle: data that had originally been processed in the context of current events in a manner that was justified for journalistic purposes continued to be 50