The man was sentenced to life in jail in 1982 for murdering two people in 1981, and has tried to get three Der Spiegel news articles naming him as a murderer to be removed from search results since 2009.
A constitutional court in Karlsruhe ruled on November 6 that he has that right, overruling the German federal court which threw out his case in 2012.
The court said the EU’s “right to erasure” (right to be forgotten) provision was stronger than the verdict of the federal court.
The man was freed from jail in 2002, and launched a legal challenge when he saw that news stories about his crime were freely available in the magazine’s online archive.
The stories detail how the man, an ex-soldier, was jailed for shooting dead two men and seriously injuring another after a row broke out onboard the yacht “Apollonia” while it sailed from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean in December 1981.
The man claims the existence of the news stories are a “violation of his privacy rights” and his “ability to develop his personality,” court records show. They add that the man “now lives in an environment which knows nothing about his offenses long ago.”
The man’s case was initially thrown out by the German federal court in November 2012, which cited public interest and press freedom, but he appealed.
The constitutional court said in an announcement on Wednesday that the “contested decision must be set aside and the case remitted.”
The case will now return to the federal courts.
As Insider’s Mary Hanbury previously reported the “right to be forgotten” is the idea that private citizens can ask companies or websites to take down certain material about them that is considered to be “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive.”
The idea rose to prominence in 2014 when the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that individuals have the right to ask search engines, such as Google, to delist certain results about them.
