Balkan
countries vying to join the EU have passed, or are in the middle of passing,
better whistleblower protection laws than most EU member states have.
Ironically, the EU is co-financing this new anti-corruption zeal.
It's
impossible to fight corporate corruption if you don't know it is happening. But
whistleblowers never get an easy ride, and their stories often end with the
realization that if they'd known what they were getting themselves into, they
wouldn't have become whistleblowers at all.
Visnja
Marilovic was a bookkeeper at the Skenderija cultural and sports center in
Sarajevo, when, one day in 2010, she was asked to process an invoice for a lot
of beds. She realized that not only was her boss furnishing his new hotel with
the company's money, but that evidence of corruption was passing across her
desk every day. To Marilovic, reporting the crime wasn't whistleblowing - it
was her job. "As a financial official, I was responsible for the documentation
to be accurate and true," she told DW. "I thought I was protecting
the company from disaster and my workplace altogether."
After
googling how to file charges, and getting prosecutors to investigate, she
assumed the director would be replaced and they could carry on working.
Instead, she got fired and went through nearly three years of misery until her
boss' trial finally began earlier this year. "I passed hell with my
children and for two months I had to live under police protection because of
threats," she said. "If I knew how much my kids had to suffer I would
not have done it."
Progressive
laws
 |
Delegates from across the region
gathered at a Sarajevo hotel |
With her
life turned upside down, Marilovic now works at the Center for Responsible
Democracy, a Sarajevo-based NGO that helped to draw up Bosnia's brand new
whistleblower protection law - which came into effect in January this year.
Bosnia is not the only country in the region that has written whistleblower protection
into its legislation in the past few years - so have Romania, Serbia, Kosovo,
Moldova, and Montenegro. Albania is in the middle of passing one through its
parliament, while the Bulgarian government last year released an in-depth
report that includes legislative proposals.
It all
amounts to a surge of legislative activity in the region that was distilled a
few weeks ago in a windowless hotel conference room in downtown Sarajevo.
Legislators, government advisers, ministry officials, NGO workers, and actual
whistleblowers came together for a conference organized by the international
NGO "Blueprint for Free Speech" and the Regional Anti-Corruption
Initiative (RAI) to compare whistleblower protection notes.
"Countries
like Bosnia, long thought of as more economically backward, are now moving
forward more seriously on whistleblower protection than Western European
countries," said Suelette Dreyfus, executive director of Blueprint for
Free Speech. "If Western Europe doesn't lift its game, it will end up being
left behind in the dust."
The irony
is of course that many of these efforts are being co-financed by the European
Union, even though Germany, France, Spain, and Portugal, for instance, have no
dedicated whistleblower protection laws.
Meanwhile,
Blueprint's Mark Worth, who says he has studied around 70 whistleblower laws
and draft laws around the world, explained the priorities to those assembled:
"The three things a whistleblower needs are: a place to disclose
information, protection from retaliation, and for the thing to be investigated.
The law has to create loophole-free provisions and mechanisms for those three
things to be covered."
Curing the
cancer
 |
Deputy Justice Minister Idlir Peci is
about to get Albania's new whistleblower
protection law through parliament |
In the heat
of the summer afternoon, with phrases like "Can we at least agree that
pre-court protection is necessary?" flying across the conference room, the
Albanian Deputy Justice Minister Idlir Peci, his shirt-sleeves rolled up,
explained that he had been stung by his country's terrible record on
corruption.
"I
spent 20 years in the Netherlands, and I decided to come back to my country
because I saw a will to change things," he told DW. "I think all the
countries in the region are tired of being dragged down. And I think the
politicians are also realizing they cannot hide behind their fingers and sell
beautiful stories to the public without really accomplishing these beautiful
stories."
But where
is this new energy coming from? "My motivation comes from all the reports,
especially from Transparency International, but also all kinds of other
rankings, where Albania scores very badly," he said. "And from the
public perception that corruption is a cancer in society that has to be
cured."
A polite
nudge from the EU
Yavor
Siderov, advisor to the Bulgarian deputy prime minister, was making similar
noises: "There seems to be a very concerted effort with regards to
anti-corruption and whistleblowing, which is amazing. It's a very positive
trend, given that the Balkans are constantly being given as examples of rampant
corruption."
Both Peci
and Siderov also said that the competition to join the EU was acting as a spur
- as was the money the EU offers to help fund the laws. "It's always a
good thing to have the European Union provide you with a polite nudge down the
road of transparency and anti-corruption," said Siderov.
As the
conference wound down, Mark Worth delivered a closing pep talk to encourage the
assembled legislators. "It's a very delicate issue, and I'm hearing a lot
of tentativeness," he told the various delegations. "I think you
should be brave, because the whistleblower's being brave."
But as
Marina Micunovic, a senior advisor at the Montenegro Ministry of Justice,
underlined afterwards, the point of a whistleblower law is to end the need for
bravery: "At the moment, we are just applauding the ones who are brave,
but they are not our target group," she said. "We need to
encourage the ones who are afraid."
 |
Martin van Pernis, Chairman, Committee Whistleblowers advice
center, speaking at the launch of the advice center Whistleblowers
|
