From the “right to delisting” to the “right to relisting

The Court of Justice’s Google Spain decision introduced a “right to delisting” that recognizes data subjects’ right to have search results for their names delisted. The lack of clarity characterizing the judgment has paved the way to millions of deindexing requests to search engines as well to a number of judicial cases in which courts strive in finding a fair balance between the rights at stake. More recently, dealing with the issue of delisting data relating to offences and criminal convictions, the CJUE seemed to introduce a new way to deal with dereferencing, namely: relisting, that is to adjust the list of results to reflect the current legal position of the data subject. The paper aims at understanding if relisting would make up for the shortcomings of the delisting. Building on existing literature and analysing recent legislation, the paper reaches the conclusion that relisting would be a better and fairer solution than delisting and that its adoption should be supported.