SPECIAL COLLECTION OF THE CASE LAW ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION Not all “right to be forgotten” claims that invoke Costeja are, however, accepted. In Plaintiff v. Google Netherlands BV, a court of Amsterdam rejected a case regarding a request submitted to Google to remove links related to the plaintiff after he had been secretly recorded and subsequently convicted for solicitation to commit murder. The recordings were broadcasted on the Dutch program, Crime Reporter, and the plaintiff’s first name and first letter of his last name were disclosed. Several other media reports followed and many links to the story became available on Google. The plaintiff relied on Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, Mario Costeja González (2014) where the CJEU had held that Google had to remove any links of past actions, criminal or otherwise, that were “irrelevant,” “excessive,” or “unnecessarily defamatory.” However, the Amsterdam Court distinguished the Costeja opinion, holding that none of these three categories of links applied to the plaintiff. In particular, the Court said that negative publicity as a result of a serious crime is generally permanently relevant information about a person and the plaintiff’s privacy rights must be weighed against the public’s and Google’s right to freedom of information. 9. De-indexation from Public or State-held Information An interesting subset of cases discusses the de-indexation of information held by the state, often in fulfillment of a clear public interest. For instance, in R.M.R. v. Agenzia delle Entrate the Supreme Court of Italy denied the request made by a tax-payer against a regional tax department claiming that the deletion of the lien (mortgage) from the register via annotation (a process through which the information is made public) by the department violated his constitutional rights, and in particular his “right to be forgotten”, because it made public his debt towards a bank. With this ruling the Supreme Court established that the deletion through annotation of the collateral security regarding immovable property from the register does not violate the “right to be forgotten” of the person involved. In such a case, it is necessary to make public that individual’s personal data, for there is a legal provision (Article 2886 paragraph 2 of the Italian Civil Code) prescribing the publication to protect a public interest. The act of registration of the lien in a public register indeed gives origin to the collateral security (in Italian, it has “natura costitutiva”). Therefore, simply “scraping off” the registered lien, without a formal annotation, would eliminate the collateral security ex tunc and would falsify the events by creating a tabula rasa. In Israel, the Supreme Court struck down a requirement to automatically de-index from search engines decisions that had been made available by commercial databases but were originally obtained from the official database of the Court of Administration. The Supreme Court made reference to the “right to be forgotten” but observed that no guidance had been provided by the CJEU since the seminal Google Spain judgment about how to approach the indexing of judicial decisions. The Supreme Court concluded that the Court of Administration requirement did not protect the privacy of the litigants and, instead, imposed a disproportionate restriction on the right to access court decisions. Similarly, the Mexican Federal Institute of Access to Information and Data 26