The Blank Protocol

Definition and scope

The Blank Protocol is a standing instrument of the Protocol Inquest office governing the handling, transit, and citation of documents determined to carry no recoverable content. It is distinguished from Protocol XVII, which governs documents whose content has been deliberately removed, and from Provisional Logging Protocol, which governs documents not yet written. The Blank Protocol addresses the third case: documents that were written and now say nothing.

The Protocol is catalogued at Floor 904-C and is maintained in three recensions, of which the second is cited in practice and the first in argument. It is most frequently invoked in disputes over whether a blank document may be entered as evidence, and in what manner its blankness is to be attested.

Provisions

The operative clauses are as follows. Clause 1 establishes that a blank document retains the standing of the office that issued it, and that its blankness is a property of the document and not of the issuer. Clause 3 requires that any document presented under the Protocol be accompanied by a certificate of blankness, countersigned by a clerk of the issuing floor. Clause 4 provides that a certificate of blankness may not itself be blank. Clause 7 permits the citation of a blank document as evidence of the procedure that produced it, but not of any matter the procedure was intended to address.

The practical difficulty of Clause 4 has generated more correspondence than any other provision. A certificate of blankness must state, in the issuing clerk's hand, that the document examined contains no recoverable content, that the examination was performed under lamplight of not less than three candlepower, and that the examiners were two in number and not of the same household. The certificate is then sealed. It is the seal, not the statement, that the Seventh Concordance later held to be dispositive — a position the Exchequer of the Folio has described as "efficient, and ruinous to the record."

Relation to the Blank Page Presentation

The Protocol predates the codification of The Blank Page Presentation by an interval the Concordances do not agree upon. The First Concordance places the Protocol forty years earlier; the Fifth places it eleven years later. The discrepancy has never been resolved, and both figures appear in current citations without comment.

Under the Presentation, a blank page presented before an assembly constitutes an assertion of unargued existence. The Blank Protocol governs the handling of such a page before it reaches an assembly, and the two instruments are frequently confused in floor-level practice. The Division has intervened twice on this point, both times in winter, and both times by way of a marginal note rather than a ruling.

"The Presentation concerns what the page means. The Protocol concerns where the page is put while meaning is disputed. Floors that confuse the two are permitted to continue, but not to appeal."

— Protocol Inquests, Second Recension, Annex 3

Attestation disputes

The leading case remains the matter of Clerk Hesper Ilwyn of Floor 341-B, who in a single season certified 112 documents as blank and was found, on audit, to have certified eleven of them twice. The audit did not establish that any of the eleven were not blank. It established only that Ilwyn had signed with two pens and had not recorded which. The Inquest's finding, entered without recension, was that a document may be blank twice and certified once, and that the second certification is a record of the auditor's arrival rather than of the document.

Ilwyn's grievance, recorded in the margin of Floor 341-B's register and never withdrawn, holds that the eleven documents in question were blank in the morning and not blank by evening, and that the Protocol does not say which moment the certificate speaks to. Subsequent editions of the Protocol have declined to address the point. Provisional markings under Protocol Delta/7 and Protocol 22-F have been held inapplicable, as both presuppose a document with content to provisionally log.

Handling and storage

Blank documents under the Protocol are stored flat, in stacks of not more than forty, in rooms with no exterior fenestration. Ventilation is required but must not be sufficient to lift a corner. The rule originates from an incident on Floor 512 in which a stack of 190 certified blanks was found, over one night, to have acquired sequence — a matter investigated under Protocol 12-D and closed without conclusion.

Certificates of blankness are filed separately from the documents they attest to, in the Central Form Repository, where they are indexed by the clerk's name rather than the document's. The consequence is that a search for a blank document produces the names of everyone who has certified blankness on that floor, which is itself a matter some readers consider informative and which the Exchequer has ruled is not.

Amendments

The Protocol has been amended nineteen times. Amendments 4, 11, and 16 are themselves blank, having been carried by acclamation and never transcribed; they are cited in argument as evidence that the assembly agreed to something. Amendment 14, the only amendment to receive a seal, added the requirement that examiners not be of the same household, a provision widely attributed to a disagreement within the Exchequer rather than to any property of blank documents.

Current administration falls to the Inquest office with consultation from the Exchequer of the Folio. Where the Protocol and a Concordance conflict, the Concordance prevails; where two Concordances conflict, the Protocol is cited, which is generally considered the Protocol's principal practical function.