Right to be forgotten: Bombay HC orders removal of man's name from records as FIR against him quashed

MUMBAI: The fundamental right to privacy incorporates the right to be forgotten, the Bombay High Court has said, ordering the court's registry department to delete the name and details of a man from records as an FIR lodged against him was quashed.

Once the proceedings against a person have been quashed, no public interest can be served by keeping information related to it alive on the internet, Justices Urmila Joshi Phalke and Nivedita Mehta of the HC's Nagpur bench said in the orders last week.

The order was passed on a petition filed by a 37-year-old man seeking a direction to the high court's Registrar General to mask his name and other personal details in the publicly accessible digital versions of judgments and orders passed in his case that are available on the HC's website.

As per the plea, the Nagpur police registered a case against the man in 2017. The dispute was later amicably resolved between the parties and the man filed a petition in HC in 2017 seeking to quash the case, which the court allowed.

The man claimed in his petition that despite complete legal exoneration, the unredacted digital records of the court orders remain accessible online and keep surfacing during routine professional and educational background checks, severally prejudicing his career progression and also causing personal stigma.

The man sought to enforce his fundamental right to be forgotten.

The high court, in its order, said the concept of right to privacy incorporates the right to be forgotten.

While access to information is a fundamental aspect of democracy, the same cannot be divorced from the need to balance the right to information of the public with the individual's right to privacy, it noted.

The petition deserved to be allowed considering the fact that the dispute between the petitioner and the complainant has now been amicably resolved, the bench said.

It directed the HC's registry department to remove the petitioner's name from all of its records.