80 | Annual Report 2018 The Prime Minister’s Office considered the correspondence to contain information which was to be released to the journalist under, among other provisions, section 28(1), first sentence, of the Access to Public Administration Files Act on the requirement to extract and grant access to certain information. In addition, the Prime Minister’s Office was of the opinion that some documents of the correspondence were subject to the right of access. However, the Prime Minister’s Office released neither the information which was subject to extraction nor the documents which were subject to the right of access. Instead, the Prime Minister’s Office explained that the information and documents would be made publicly available on Parliament’s website when the answer to a question asked by Parliament’s Immigration and Integration Committee had been sent to Parliament. As authority for its decision, the Prime Minister’s Office referred to section 28(2) paragraph (3) of the Access to Public Administration Files Act, which provides that there is no requirement to extract and grant access to information which is publicly available, and to section 40(1) paragraph (2) of the Act, under which an authority is not required to release material which is subject to the right of access if it is publicly available. It was the impression of the Prime Minister’s Office that the answer would be sent to Parliament at approximately the same time that it made its decision on the journalist’s request for access. However, it turned out that the answer was not sent until two days later. In the Ombudsman’s opinion there was no basis for interpreting section 28(2) paragraph (3) and section 40(1) paragraph (2) of the Access to Public Administration Files Act as permitting authorities not to release material which is subject to the right of access in cases where the material has not yet been made publicly available but is expected to be so shortly. The Prime Minister’s Office should therefore have released the material to the journalist when making its decision. Further, the Ombudsman found that the material contained more information which was subject to extraction than assumed by the Prime Minister’s Office. The Ombudsman therefore recommended that the case be reopened. 2018-24. Refusal of access to documents on the grounds of failure to specify subject A journalist had asked the Prime Minister’s Office for access to e-mails, if any, regarding ministerial matters received by the Prime Minister’s Office within a spe­ cified time period from the private e-mail accounts of the Prime Minister and two employees. The Prime Minister’s Office denied the journalist access on the grounds that his request did not meet the requirement in section 9(1) paragraph (2) of the Access to Public Administration Files Act that a request for access must state the subject to which the case or document relates. The Ombudsman stated that the starting point was clearly that the journalist’s request did not meet the requirement in section 9(1) paragraph (2) because the subject of any e-mails of the nature concerned had not been specified. However, the question was whether the case involved such a ‘quite extraordinary situation’ as described in the White Paper on the Access to Pub­ lic Administration Files Act that correspondence in itself might be regarded as the subject. In the Ombudsman’s opinion the term ‘quite extraordinary situation’ was to be understood in a narrow sense. On that basis, the Ombudsman had no grounds for repudiating the assessment of the Prime Minister’s Office that the case did not involve a ‘quite extraordinary situation’ in which the correspondence in itself could be regarded as the subject. This applied despite the fact that – as a result of the purpose of his request – the journalist had no possibility of specifying the subject of any e-mails which might have been received by the Prime Minister’s Office from the private e-mail accounts of the Prime Minister and the two employees.