appendix d: summaries of selected cases e. Ministry of justice The following cases concluded in 2011 were selected for publication in the Annual Report: 5-1. Refusal of access to informal e-mails between public authorities. The document concept A prison inmate asked the Department of the Prison and Probation Service for access to documents regarding his case of leave from prison. The Department refused to grant him access to the internal work documents of the case with reference to section 12 of the Public Administration Act. The Department subsequently stated that it had exempted a number of ‘informal e-mails’ which had been exchanged during the case processing between the Department and the state prison where the man was serving his sentence. The Department’s grounds for the exemption were that the information contained in the ‘informal e-mails’ would not have been included in the duty to take notes if the information had been received by telephone. In principle, a party to a case is entitled to access to all documents of the case unless one of the exemptions in sections 12-15 of the Public Administration Act is applicable. The Ombudsman therefore found that the decisive point must be whether the informal e-mails could be considered documents. The Ombudsman stated that the question of whether it can be presumed that an e-mail can be considered a document must be decided on the basis of an individual assessment of, in particular, the contents of the e-mail in question, but that it is unlikely that the sole decisive factor is whether the e-mail contains information included in the duty to take notes (pursuant to section 6 of the Act on Public Access to Documents on Public Files). The Ombudsman found no grounds for criticising the Department’s interpretation, but in his opinion it was questionable whether some of the ‘informal e-mails’ were not to be considered documents. Consequently, he recommended that the Department reconsider the question of access in respect of these e-mails – and thereby also the question of whether they could be considered documents. The Ombudsman found no grounds for criticising that the Department had exempted internal work documents from access pursuant to section 12 of the 107