HURBAIN v. BELGIUM JUDGMENT appropriate, relevant and limited to what was necessary for those same purposes when they were archived. The applicant added that seeking to justify anonymisation by referring to the existence of a paper archive was outdated, inaccurate and inappropriate, given that the future of publishing depended on migration to digital technology and that paper archives would therefore cease to exist. Moreover, the Court itself had asserted the importance of digital archives (the applicant referred to M.L. and W.W. v. Germany, nos. 60798/10 and 65599/10, § 90, 28 June 2018). 140. In the applicant’s submission, individuals should not be allowed to restrict the public’s access to information concerning them and published by third parties, unless the information in question was private or defamatory in nature and its publication was not justified for other reasons. Since limitations on access to information which members of the public had the right to obtain, as a matter of public interest, had to be justified by particularly compelling reasons, any person wishing to restrict that access had to demonstrate the existence of significant harm, especially if the information was public in nature. Hence, in the applicant’s submission, it was not enough for an individual to complain of the effects of a “virtual criminal record”; he or she had to demonstrate the actual damage suffered. In the present case G., who had alleged serious harm, had at no point demonstrated its existence before the domestic courts. Moreover, the Chamber had not ascertained whether G. had demonstrated the existence of such harm. 141. As to the criterion concerning a debate of public interest, the applicant argued that the obligation for him to assess, when a request for anonymisation was made, which information should be kept and which could be discarded was excessive and at the same time posed a threat to democracy, as the interest of archived material for the public did not necessarily diminish with the passage of time. On the contrary, journalists, researchers, historians, sociologists and members of the public had to be able to carry out research into past events, including short news stories, which constituted a genre in their own right as vital witnesses to their time, the state of society and changing civilisations. Thus, in the applicant’s submission, the public-interest criterion was not a suitable means of determining whether or not there had been interference. 142. It was also necessary to consider the nature of the published information: in the balancing exercise between the rights at stake, the person seeking to protect his or her privacy had to demonstrate that the alleged infringement concerned archived information that was private (confidential and/or intimate) rather than public in nature. In the present case, the information in question had become public because G. had committed a serious offence. Although details of previous convictions constituted sensitive data, as indeed was made clear by Directive 95/46/EC (see paragraph 68 above) and by the Belgian Protection of Private Life Act (see paragraph 49 above), they could nevertheless be published for journalistic 51