In what is being characterized as a surprise decision, the European Court of Justice ruled Tuesday that individuals can ask Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) to remove links to certain documents that turn up in search results on the individual’s name. The Court of Justice is highest court in the European Union and its decision is final.

The case began in Spain and the issue became known as the “right to be forgotten.” The judgment could be highly disruptive to search engine providers like Google and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT), depending on how the decision is applied and enforced.

The court’s decision turns on its interpretation of an EU directive that “has the objective of protecting the fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons (in particular the right to privacy) when personal data are processed, while removing the obstacles to the free flow of such data.” The court ruled that a Google search “processes” the data within the meaning of the directive “regardless of the fact that the operator of the search engine carries them out without distinction in respect of information other than the personal data.”

Because the search results have been processed, a request by an individual for Google or other search engine operator to “forget” some of the data returned in a search query, the EU court states that “even initially lawful processing of accurate data may, in the course of time, become incompatible with the directive … the data appear to be inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed.”

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So a newspaper report that is returned by a Google search revealing that an individual was convicted of a crime in the dim and dusty past may be expunged from search results, but the original newspaper report may presumably be left as it was. The EU court appears to have sanctioned selective memory, not the right to be forgotten.

The court tries to deal with that by giving the search engine operator some latitude when considering a request to remove a link from search results:

[I]t should in particular be examined whether the data subject has a right that the information in question relating to him personally should, at this point in time, no longer be linked to his name by a list of results that is displayed following a search made on the basis of his name. If that is the case, the links to web pages containing that information must be removed from that list of results, unless there are particular reasons, such as the role played by the data subject in public life, justifying a preponderant interest of the public in having access to the information when such a search is made.

One thing this ruling means, for sure, is that Google is going to be spending a lot more time dealing with requests to erase search results. And a lot more time in European courtrooms if it denies the requests.

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