Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 10 July 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality

Spent Convictions: Discussion

Dr. T.J. McIntyre:

That is also a very good question because there were two conflicting judgments on exactly that point from Spain and Belgium in the past two years. The Deputy has put me slightly on the spot. I do not have the details of those in front of me. In one case the court of cassation in Belgium took the view that this was information which should be deleted, so information in a newspaper archive about an old conviction of an individual where there was no great public interest in the case could be required to be anonymised. The newspaper could be required to redact the name of the individual in the old online report. Whereas in the Spanish case the supreme court took the opposite view and held that the integrity of the newspaper archives outweighed the privacy and article 8 rights of the individual.