CYIL vol. 12 (2021)

Ondrej Hamuľák – Lusine Vardanyan – Hovsep Kocharyan CYIL 12 (2021) which is understood as a mutual recognition of the validity of foreign law out of good will. According to this principle, EU courts should not generally impose European legal norms on jurisdictions outside the EU. 89 In the Glawischnig-Piesczek case the Court stressed the importance of consistency between EU law and international rules, without naming the principle of international comity. 90 The CJEU made it possible for Austrian courts to impose obligations “to remove information covered by the injunction or to block access to that information worldwide within the framework of the relevant international law.” 91 However, Advocate General Szpunar in the Google v. CNIL case pointed specifically to the principle of international comity as incompatible with the global application of the right to be forgotten . 92 And the ensuring global compliance with Article 17 GDPR must take this principle of international comity into account. Of course, this is somewhat difficult, given that the “imposition” of their own standards for the protection of digital rights is inherent not only in the EU, but also in other states that are trying to extend the rules of their jurisdiction to information and data. We believe that the CJEU is not faced with the dilemma of choosing between the local and global application of the right to be forgotten, but rather with the question of developing criteria that can pragmatically solve the problems of modulating the impact of the EU data protection law outside EU borders. However, the choice (or rather the need) for the global application of this right will undoubtedly be constantly “hanging” over the CJEU: criticism of the “imposition” of its data protection standards on other States that have their own claims to control data, contrary to the obligations of the international comity and the need to respect the diversity of legal systems. And this is one of the many challenges of the global application of data protection standards. And it is possible (and in fact it is already clear) that, in view of the increasing tension between these opposite trends, the efforts of the CJEU will not be aimed at choosing one of the options for applying the right to be forgotten, but rather at finding the most acceptable balance between them. This can already be seen in the EU case law, in particular in the case of Glawischnig-Piesczek . The protection of the digital rights exposes a tension between efforts of states to impose their own standards outside their borders and aspirations to claim sovereign control over data and information. This tension exposes the risk of a fragmentation of the digital world. Although it is obvious that such a tension in the framework of these opposite tendencies, as a rule, is mostly growing. And as the Court’s case law shows, it tries to offer judgments that will vary between these two extremes, as in Google v. CNIL and Glawischnig-Piesczek v. Facebook . The CNIL case defines the local application of law and allows for further recognition of the global application of EU law and the right to be forgotten in particular. But if in the CNIL case the Court limited itself only to stating that in certain cases such a global application is permissible, then in the Glawischnig-Piesczek case the Court suggested such an application as the main solution to the questions raised in the preliminary request.

89 MCCARTHY, H.: Expanding the GDPR’s journalism exemption – is all the world a stage? Privacy and Data Protection . 2019. (4), 10. p. 10.

90 Ibid., p. 51. 91 Ibid., p. 53. 92 Opinion of AG Szpunar. Case C507/17 Google LLC v CNIL , para. 27.

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