2013 at the Ombudsman institution Service advice and assistance to government ministers) and section 27(ii) (the so-called rule on Civil Service advice and assistance to Members of Parliament). Did these new provisions represent sensible adjustments of the Act to changed structures and processes within the Civil Service, or were they gratuitous restrictions on a fundamental principle of free access to public records? There were many opinions on the issue, but the bill was passed without any amendments. Obviously, it is not for an ombudsman institution to take positions on such fundamental political issues. We have, however, applied many resources on preparing the institution for the coming into force of the Act. This is because very few cases on access to public records are brought before the courts, and consequently, the Ombudsman is – and always has been – the central supervisory body in this field. One of the aspects on which we used a lot of time was the matching of expectations with the relevant players, including the media: Which aspects of the Act would it make sense to have tested by the Ombudsman, and which issues were more or less decided with Parliament’s passing of the Act? These were questions we discussed with the Danish Union of Journalists and the Association of Da­ nish Media, among others. This also gave us the opportunity to explain that we will give very high priority to cases involving the new Act, but that the Act also implies that the Ombudsman is not to apply an especially ‘access-friendly’ interpretation in individual cases. We must simply reach those conclusions which we must assume, based on our usual methodology, that Parliament has intended. However, this also implies that there are areas where it is to be particularly expected that we will ‘test’ the public authorities, for instance in questions regarding the use of the principle of increased access to files and in questions regarding rapid case processing. We had similar discussions with key government departments and Local Government Denmark, and not least, we engaged in extensive teaching and seminar activities for a broad section of public authority employees. We also provided general assistance to public authorities with the preparation of guidelines etc. on the new Act. Optimisation of our own administrative procedures in cases about access to public records played an important part in our preparations for the coming into force of the Act. It is a central message of the new Act that the public authorities must be very fast in deciding on requests for access to files, and though the Act – and its case processing deadlines – does not apply to the Ombudsman, we have made a point of matching the same demands to the greatest possible 13