HURBAIN v. BELGIUM JUDGMENT complained of the fact that when her name was entered in a search engine, one of the results that was displayed contained a link to the transcript of a television broadcast which had been uploaded to the online archives in 2010. In that broadcast the complainant, who was mentioned by name, was accused of unfairly treating an employee who had been dismissed. As the dispute was governed by legislation that was fully harmonised under EU law, the Federal Constitutional Court applied the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. 123. The court held that where the persons concerned requested a search engine operator to refrain from referencing and displaying a link to certain content on the Internet, the balancing exercise to be performed in such cases had to take into account not only the personality rights of the individuals concerned (Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter) but also, in the context of search engine operators’ freedom to conduct a business (Article 16 of the Charter), the fundamental rights of the content providers concerned as well as Internet users’ interest in obtaining information. 124. In so far as a prohibition on the display of certain search results was ordered on the basis of an examination of the specific content of an online publication, and the content provider was thus deprived of an important platform for disseminating the content that would otherwise be available to it, this constituted a restriction of the content provider’s freedom of expression (Article 11 of the Charter). However, the Federal Constitutional Court specified that the search engine operator could not invoke Article 11 of the Charter in relation to the search results displayed by its engine, as those search services were not aimed at disseminating specific opinions. Observing that the CJEU required the interest of the general public in access to information to be taken into account as a manifestation of the right to free information guaranteed by Article 11 of the Charter, the court added that the role of the press in a democratic society also had to be taken into consideration. However, at issue in this regard were not the individual users’ rights, deriving from Article 11 of the Charter, to access information on the specific website in question, but rather freedom of information as a principle to be weighed in the balance when restricting the rights guaranteed by Article 16 of the Charter. 125. The Federal Constitutional Court also noted that the weight of the search engine operator’s economic interests by itself was generally not sufficient, in the context of the balancing exercise, to justify restricting the data subjects’ claim for protection. Greater weight was to be accorded to the interest of the public in obtaining information and, especially, to the fundamental rights of third parties. Accordingly, it could not be presumed in the case at hand – in contrast to certain cases determined by the CJEU, albeit in circumstances that differed from those in the present case – that the general right of personality should take precedence. On the contrary, the competing fundamental rights had to be balanced on an equal basis. Just as individuals 46