Court rejects appeal against refusal to delete or anonymise article on criminal conviction

The case concerns a man convicted in 2009 by the Nanterre criminal court to two years' suspended imprisonment and a 20,000 euro fine for complicity in breach of trust, handling of misappropriated property, and misuse of corporate assets. The offences dated from 2002-2004, when he was president of the football section of a sports club. On 15 June 2009, 20 Minutes France published an article titled 'Il détournait de l'argent pour un club' on its website reporting the conviction. On appeal, the Versailles court of appeal reduced the sentence on 16 February 2011 to one year suspended and a 30,000 euro fine, and ordered that the conviction not be recorded on his criminal record extract. On 15 November 2019, 20 Minutes added a note to the article referring to the appeal ruling, at the request of the claimant's lawyer.

On 2 June 2020, the man sued 20 Minutes France, seeking removal of the article from its website, alternatively anonymisation of his name within it, or, more subsidiarily, de-indexing from search engines. The Paris court of appeal dismissed these claims on 20 February 2025. He appealed to the Cour de cassation, arguing among other things that the appellate court had reversed the burden of proof by requiring him to show that his rights outweighed press freedom, and that it had failed to properly assess his current notoriety, the time elapsed, and the accessibility of the online archive.

The Cour de cassation dismissed the appeal. It reiterated that the right to privacy and freedom of expression carry equal normative weight and that courts must conduct a concrete balancing exercise, guided by the criteria set out by the European Court of Human Rights in Hurbain v. Belgium: the nature of the archived information, time elapsed, its continuing relevance, the notoriety of the person seeking erasure and their conduct since the events, the negative effects of continued online availability, the accessibility of the digital archive, and the impact of any measure on press freedom. The court of appeal had found that the conviction concerned serious offences committed while holding an official position, that the claimant enjoyed substantial notoriety in sports and politics, that he had not demonstrated harm outweighing the public interest in the information, and that anonymisation would strip the article of its relevance for the public. The Cour de cassation held that this reasoning constituted a proper balancing exercise and that there was no reversal of the burden of proof.