A European court has granted Danish lawyer Dan Shefet the right to be forgotten on the Internet, who has been accused of malpractice and fraud in the past.

Last year, the court ruling forced search engines to remove a link deemed unfair to Shefet, a decision that was criticized by free speech advocates but was hailed by privacy advocates as an important step for human rights, according to a New York Times report.

The Internet is well known as an arena where nothing is sacred and everyone’s secrets are out in the open, so therefore anything published there is in the public domain forever. But a French court claims that a link that implicates him in certain criminal activities is necessarily defamatory and must be removed from all search domains, which means that no one is allowed to know that Shefet has faced criminal charges in the past. Google faces a tall order in trying to remove all links through any international sites, including its main Google.com page, although it is technically in the American domain and European laws may have a tough time enorcing it.

However, the Danish lawyer Dan Shefet, who has been living in Paris for decades now, said he was concerned about the accusations of malpractice and fraud that exist on the Internet and appealed to Google in 2013 to have those links taken down.

There was one problem: Google removed just the links to the French site, so Shefet went to a Paris court to force the Internet to forget him. Google failed to defeat him in court, and the name Dan Shefet has permanently been forgotten from the Internet as a result.