E.A.T.

Whistleblowing Compliance Checker

As countries across the EU’s 27 member states begin to develop new whistleblower protection laws, one of EAT Project partners, Blueprint for Free Speech, published a new online tool for evaluating proposed legislation against the Directive’s requirements.

The EU Whistleblowing Compliance Checker is accompanied by the report “Getting Whistleblower Protection Right: A Practical Guide to Transposing the EU Directive”, which you can read here:

EU Directive 2019/1937 of the European Parliament and of the Council on the protection of persons who report breaches of Union law, outlines a basic standard of protection. All 27 countries in the EU must translate the Directive into national laws by the end of 2021.

Blueprint’s suite of tools will support this effort by helping policy makers and civil society evaluate proposed national laws, to see if they comply with the Directive.

Filling in the online tool, which takes about 30-45 minutes, runs 3 tests against the target law:

1.  compliance with the Directive
2.  comparison with international standards
3.  COVID-19 whistleblower case-readiness

The COVID-19 readiness test is drawn from real examples in the pandemic.

The online tool produces separate grades (“A” to “F”) for each test. It explains where there may be shortcomings in a proposed law, and how the proposed law can be improved.

The online tool also includes an online kit to help produce a media statement, with sample texts assessors can use depending on which areas of testing falls short. In this way, you can easily translate the output directly into action, via media outreach to highlight any shortcomings in the transposition process in your own member states. This explains how the evaluation process takes place inside the online tool:

Both the online tool and the guide may also be helpful to non-EU member states who are analysing proposed laws elsewhere against the evolving new European standard.