HURBAIN v. BELGIUM JUDGMENT (iii) The contemporary interest of the information 222. As a matter directly linked to the above considerations regarding the role of the press in creating and maintaining archives, the Court must next ascertain whether the article in question continues to contribute to a debate of public interest, whether it has acquired any historical, research-related or statistical interest (see M.L. and W.W. v. Germany, cited above, § 99, and the judgment of the Spanish Constitutional Court – paragraph 108 above) and whether it remains relevant for the purposes of placing recent events in context in order to understand them better. This assessment should be conducted from the perspective of the time when the person concerned submits his or her request concerning the “right to be forgotten”. 223. In this context it should be pointed out that, on the subject of initial publication, the Court has consistently held that there is little scope under Article 10 § 2 of the Convention for restrictions on freedom of expression when a matter of public interest is at stake. The margin of appreciation of States is reduced where a debate on a matter of public interest is concerned (see Editions Plon v. France, no. 58148/00, § 44, ECHR 2004-IV, and Couderc and Hachette Filipacchi Associés, cited above, § 96). According to the Court’s case-law, the public interest relates to matters which affect the public to such an extent that it may legitimately take an interest in them, which attract its attention or which concern it to a significant degree, especially in that they affect the well-being of citizens or the life of the community. This is also the case with regard to matters which are capable of giving rise to considerable controversy, which concern an important social issue, or which involve a problem that the public would have an interest in being informed about. Nevertheless, the public interest cannot be reduced to the public’s thirst for information about the private life of others, or to the reader’s wish for sensationalism or even voyeurism (see Couderc and Hachette Filipacchi Associés, cited above, §§ 101 and 103, and the references cited therein). From this perspective, an article’s contribution to a debate of public interest may persist over time, either because of the information itself or because of new factors arising since publication, for instance subsequent developments in the original judicial proceedings. 224. However, owing to the specific nature of digital press archives, which concern information that is rarely of topical relevance, their current contribution to a debate of public interest is not decisive in most cases. In the absence of a contribution to such a debate, it must also be ascertained whether the archived information is of interest for any of the other purposes referred to above, for instance for historical or scientific purposes. 225. In the present case the Liège Court of Appeal held that, twenty years after the events, the identity of a person who was not a public figure did not add to the public interest of the article, which merely made a statistical contribution to a public debate on road safety. In the Court of Appeal’s view, the events reported on in the article were clearly not of historical significance 76