Conseil d’Etat 401258
This source card preserves the French Conseil d’Etat’s 6 December 2019 decision applying GC and Others C-136 17 to a child-sex-offence conviction.
The affected private person had worked as a school supervisor and activity leader. He was convicted of sexual touching of minors, sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment, given ten years of socio-judicial supervision, and prohibited from work involving contact with children.
Google refused to de-reference two accurate press reports from results for searches on his name. CNIL closed his complaint. After the CJEU supplied the Article 10 test, the Conseil d’Etat annulled CNIL’s refusal.
The court relied on:
- the direct and permanent access that name-search indexing gave the public to the conviction;
- the person’s lack of public notoriety;
- the age of the facts and conviction;
- the consequences for reintegration, including his claim that indexing cost him two jobs;
- the restricted access that ordinarily applies to official conviction data.
The accurate journalistic origin of the reports did not make continued name indexing strictly necessary. Nor did the fact that the ten-year supervision measure was still running when the court decided the case.
The decision does not require de-referencing of every child-sex-offence result. It establishes the narrower but decisive point that no categorical lifetime exception follows from the seriousness or subject matter of the offence.