132 ANNUAL REPORT 2015 The Ministry of Defence subsequently reopened the case and decided to give the journalist access to the draft, except for a relatively limited number of sentences and paragraphs. 2015-48. E-mails exchanged between the Ministry of Defence and Defence Command Denmark in connection with ministerial advice and assistance. Extraction of information A journalist complained to the Ombudsman because he had received a partial refusal of access to correspondence between the Ministry of Defence and Defence Command Denmark about two articles in a daily newspaper based, among other things, on an interview with the Chief of Defence. The correspondence resulted in a press release which was published on the website of the Defence Command. The grounds given by the Ministry for its partial refusal were that the correspondence consisted of documents and information exchanged in connection with ministerial advice and assistance. The Ombudsman agreed with the Ministry’s assessment of the documents and information which it had exempted with reference to the provisions of the Access to Public Administration Files Act on ministerial advice and assistance. In this connection, the Ombudsman stated that in his view section 24 of the Act was (also) applicable in a situation such as the present – where the head of a government agency acted on behalf of the minister – and that the decisive factor in the assessment was that in the situation in question, the Minister needed advice and assistance from the Civil Service (or must be presumed to need such advice and assistance subsequently). Unlike the Ministry of Defence, the Ombudsman was of the opinion that some of the exempted documents contained information about the factual basis of the case that was relevant to the case. In principle, this information was therefore to be extracted and access to be granted to it. However, some of this information was also included in a document to which the journalist had already been granted access – and which was publicly available. This meant that the Ministry was not obliged to extract the information and grant the journalist access to it. With regard to the remaining information to which the obligation to extract and grant access to information applied, the Ombudsman recommended that the Ministry reopen the case in order to consider whether the journalist could be granted further access to information.