Ministry of Justice’s new guidelines: Ministers and civil servants must save text messages for 25 years. In the future, ministers, permanent secretaries, and special advisers must save text messages and messages from other chat services for 25 years. According to Politiken, this is outlined in a new set of guidelines from the Ministry of Justice.
“For ministers, special advisers, and permanent secretaries, there are such special circumstances surrounding their position and function that their text messages and more should be stored for a longer period than ten years,” the ministry writes according to the media outlet.
The new guidelines are a consequence of the practice laid out by the Mink Commission back in 2022, the ministry informed Politiken. During the commission’s work, it emerged that, among others, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (Social Democrats) and her permanent secretary, Barbara Berthelsen, had set their phones to automatically delete their text messages after 30 days.