The Council of the European Union adopted on Monday new rules that are due to ensure better protection for whistleblowers against retribution once member states transpose the new regulations into their national law by 2021
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 07th October, 2019) The Council of the European Union adopted on Monday new rules that are due to ensure better protection for whistleblowers against retribution once member states transpose the new regulations into their national law by 2021."The EU is committed to having a well functioning democratic system based on the rule of law. That includes providing a high level of protection across the Union to those whistle-blowers who have the courage to speak up. No one should risk their reputation or job for exposing illegal behaviours," Anna-Maja Henriksson, the justice minister of Finland, who is currently presiding over the council, said in a statement.
According to the statement, the main elements of the new regulations include the establishment of effective channels of reporting within companies; introduction of safeguards to protect whistleblowers; and creation of an obligation for authorities to respond and follow-up to whistleblowers' reports.
The rules are intended to have a wide application scope throughout various fields, including public procurement, money laundering, transport and product safety, nuclear safety, public health, and consumer and date protection.
The new regulations come as a result of a 2017 study carried out for the European Commission, which estimated that the EU as a whole lost potential benefits amounting up to 9.6 billion Euros ($10.5 billion) a year due to a lack of whistleblower protection.
Whistleblowers turned out to be behind a number of major scandals, including the one involving Cambridge Analytica, which revealed that information of millions of Facebook users were harvested without their permission, and the Panama papers leak, which exposed the secret offshore financial activity of prominent individuals worldwide.
