MR JUSTICE WARBY Approved Judgment 48. NT1 & NT2 v Google LLC A number of public law cases decided over the last 8 years have recognised that a conviction may, with the passage of time, so recede into the past as to become an aspect of an individual’s private life. Three cases in the Supreme Court, one in the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal, and one in the Court of Appeal of England and Wales have touched on the issue. (1) R (L) v Comr of Police for the Metropolis (Secretary of State for the Home Dept intervening) [2009] UKSC 3 [2010] 1 AC 410 (“L”) was a case about cautions. At [27] Lord Hope suggested (obiter) that Strasbourg authority showed that information about convictions “which is collected and stored in central records can fall within the scope of private life within the meaning of article 8(1), with the result that it will interfere with the applicant’s private life when it is released.” Although in one sense public information because the convictions took place in public “… As it recedes into the past, it becomes a part of the person’s private life which must be respected”. (2) R (T) v Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police [2014] UKSC 35 [2015] AC 49 (“T”) was also about cautions. As Lord Wilson said at [18], the appeals did “not relate to the disclosure of a spent conviction that will have been imposed in public”, but he referred to Lord Hope’s observation in L and adopted the suggestion of Liberty, an intervenor, that “the point at which a conviction … recedes into the past and becomes part of a person’s private life will usually be the point at which it becomes spent under the 1974 Act”. The rest of the Justices agreed at [158]. (3) In Gaughran v Chief Constable for the Police Service of Northern Ireland [2015] UKSC 29 [2016] AC 345 [37] the majority held that “the fact that a conviction may become spent is a potentially relevant but by no means decisive factor in considering where the balance lies”, between the privacy rights of convicted persons and the public policy justifications for retaining biometric data. (4) In CG v Facebook Ireland Ltd [2016] NICA 54 [2017] EMLR 12 [44] the NICA referred to T and agreed that with the passage of time the protection of an offender by prohibiting the disclosure of previous convictions may be such as to outweigh the interests of open justice. On the facts that information, in conjunction with other information, gave rise to a reasonable expectation of privacy. The Court held, however, that the open justice principle and the public’s right to know about convictions and have information about what happened in open court could “only be outweighed in the most compelling circumstances” by the Article 8 rights of the individual in freedom from intrusion. It is right to mention that this was a case about disclosures on Facebook in 2013 of convictions for sexual offending in 2007 for which the claimant had been sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. The rehabilitation regime was not in play. (5) In R (P) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2017] EWCA Civ 321 [2017] 2 Cr App R 12 the Court of Appeal considered the lawfulness of the scheme for the disclosure of convictions, in its revised form following the Supreme Court’s decision in T. The Court concluded that the vice identified by the Supreme Court was that the scheme required the indiscriminate disclosure