The European Court of Human Rights has been accused of approving the “rewriting of history” by backing the extension of the “right to be forgotten” from search engines to cover news websites more broadly.

The case, involving French-language Belgian newspaper Le Soir, last year saw an intervention from UK publishers Times Newspapers and Guardian News and Media alongside press freedom organisations as they argued forcing news websites to remove archive material, an “essential component of modern-day newsgathering and reporting”, would not be a “proportionate restriction on freedom of expression”.

However the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, of which the UK is still a participating country despite Brexit, has now ruled in favour of a driver who had wanted to be anonymised in reporting of a deadly car crash for which he was responsible.