A pedophile has failed in his attempt to censor the internet to conceal his past convictions for child prostitution.
The man, an unnamed criminal from Japan, argued that he had a so-called “right to be forgotten” in a case before the country’s supreme court.
He said that Google should be forced to scrub its search results to remove news reports detailing his arrest and conviction, which took place in 2013.
However, his attempts to rewrite the past failed when the court ruled in favor of Google’s right to free expression.
The court’s decision, reported by the Wall Street Journal, also supported the public’s right to know about serious criminal offences.
It was the first time Japan has considered a right to be forgotten case.
The issue is most prominent in Europe, where judges decided that all citizens do have a right to be forgotten, and can submit requests to Google and other search engines to have unflattering search results disappeared.
The Japanese plaintiff had won his case in a lower court, then had it overturned by a higher one.
The supreme court sided with the latter decision and the matter is now closed.
Supreme court justice Kiyoko Okabe said: “Child prostitution is prohibited by the penal code and is a target of strong social condemnation.
“The deletion [of search results] can be demanded only when value of privacy protection clearly exceeds freedom of expression of search sites.”