HURBAIN v. BELGIUM JUDGMENT question was well known. Other criteria also came into play: G.’s rehabilitation, the duties and responsibilities incumbent on the media in accordance with the law and the principles of responsible journalism, which differed from those relating to search engines, and the extent to which the information was disseminated. Those criteria had been deemed to be decisive by a number of the highest courts in Europe in determining disputes concerning the “right to be forgotten” (see “Comparative law and practice” above). 154. The Government added that the anonymisation order had been necessary in a democratic society in view of the circumstances of the present case, and in particular of the passage of time, which had rendered publication harmful. The domestic courts had indeed examined, as they were required to, whether other measures less restrictive of freedom of expression were possible, acting within their margin of appreciation and in accordance with the disposition principle and the requirement for trial to take place within a reasonable time. Thus, they had taken into account: (a) the main object of the statement of claim (anonymisation of the archived article rather than delisting); (b) the fact that placing the article in context by inserting additional text was not an appropriate measure; and (c) the position of the applicant, who had clearly rejected the suggestion of using noindex tags. While delisting was, as a general rule, the measure least restrictive of freedom of expression, in the instant case the measure ordered by the Belgian courts had been the most appropriate to the facts of the case, bearing in mind the range of measures proposed by the applicant. Moreover, de-indexing by Le Soir would amount to more serious interference with freedom of expression as the article would then no longer be indexed by external search engines and would thus be inaccessible, regardless of the search terms used, except through a search on the original website. 155. The Government argued that the present case was to be distinguished from previous cases examined by the Court concerning the “right to be forgotten”. Firstly, in their view, it was to be distinguished from the case of M.L. and W.W. v. Germany (cited above), in view of the particular circumstances of the present case and especially the fact that G. was not well known, the fact that he had had no contact with the press, the fact that the events reported on in the impugned article were of less interest, and the fact that G. had been rehabilitated. Secondly, the facts were to be distinguished from those in Węgrzynowski and Smolczewski (cited above); in that case the applicant had sought the outright removal of the defamatory article, which had been published online at the same time as its publication in the newspaper’s print edition. It was on the basis of this very specific set of factual and procedural circumstances that the Court had held that the removal of the article would amount to rewriting history. In the Government’s view, it could in no sense be inferred from that judgment that any alteration, however slight, made to the online version of an article compared with the 55