Are they from low quality sites or sites in a 'bad neighborhood'? Otherwise I'd wonder why you'd want to remove them. They provide traffic and ranking potential by being in place. You can contact google directly through the webmasters panel or the actual site. Different webmasters will range in their difficulty to deal with.
Your best bet if you went the spammy route is going to look into the disavow tool on google. Was just released this week. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-new-tool-to-disavow-links.html
You can follow the instructions Identify the backlinks Contact Webmasters to remove links in one place Track the performance of the requests
Yes you can remove the bad backlinks by the web master tool. I am telling you following steps: Login webmaster tool> click on site configuration>Crawler access>Remove Url>paste that Url Best of luck
Hi, If you want to remove your backlinks then you should contact website's webmasters to remove and in other case, if you want to remove low quality backlinks because of penguin update then please download all such type of links from webmaster and create a text file and upload that file to disavow all the links.
Backlinks always helps us to increase traffic, so i think there is no need to remove backlinks. If you want means then mail to the corresponding website about removing backlinks.
You can use disavow link,it is the new feature of webmaster tool where you can put the list of website from where you want to remove your backlinks.
If it is not a website that you own, you could look for a way to contact the admin and ask him/her to remove the link.