The Ministry of Administrative Affairs published its annual transparency report on Thursday, a 214-page document in which the chapter titled "Transparency Performance" appears as a blank page bearing the note "withheld for transparency reasons."

The note appears twice. The second instance is printed in the chapter's table of contents.

Deputy Registrar Milda Hovsen said the withholding was itself an act of openness. "A ministry that tells you what it is not telling you is being transparent about its transparency," she said at a press briefing attended by four journalists and one man filming the lectern for a channel about lecterns. "Less scrupulous ministries would simply have removed the page number."

The requests

The report instructs citizens seeking the withheld chapter to file a written request with the Office of Records Integrity. The office's own listing in the ministry directory reads "correspondence suspended," a status it has held, per the directory's revision history, for roughly three years.

Fifty-one requests were filed on the first day. The ministry has confirmed receiving four, three of which were requests for confirmation that the other requests had been received.

A spokesperson, Mr Halvard Perrin, said the office would respond to all requests within the statutory window of "a reasonable period, to be determined reasonably." He declined to say whether the window had a beginning. Asked whether the chapter could simply be published, he noted that publication would render the requests unnecessary and would therefore be unfair to citizens who had already filed them.

"That would be a slap in the face to the fifty-one," he said.

What happens next

The ministry has scheduled a public consultation on the report for December, at a venue to be disclosed to attendees after they arrive. A registration form asks participants to state whether they intend to be transparent, with options "yes" and "see chapter."

The report's remaining chapters are available in full. They concern procurement, staffing and a 40-page section on paper, which the ministry describes as "the cornerstone of open government."

At time of writing, the blank chapter had been photographed, cropped and reposted 12,000 times, mostly by accounts asking what the ministry was hiding. The ministry reposted the most widely shared photograph, captioned "Glad the public is engaging with the report."