By Alja Poler De Zwart and Mercedes Samavi
Do you work for an organization that does not know what to do with its whistleblowing hotline in Europe? Are you patiently waiting for any news on what is happening with the implementation throughout the European Economic Area (“EEA”) of the new EU’s Directive on the protection of persons who report breaches of European Union law (PDF: 1.5 MB) (the “Whistleblowing Directive”), while getting more and more concerned about the lack of information? Well, if it helps at all, you are not alone. Although the implementation deadline of December 17 appears quite far away for now, this is deceptive — especially for multinational organizations that have to start preparing to comply with likely varying local implementation requirements in multiple countries.
We have been monitoring the implementation progress in 30 EEA countries, and the outlook does not look that great. As far as we can tell, not a single country has managed to adopt its implementing law to date, and some countries appear to have not even started yet. The good news is that the majority of countries are in the middle of their implementation process, but whether local legislators will manage to agree on the bills soon enough to have them ready before December 17 is anyone’s guess. As eternal optimists, we hope for the best. But while we wait, we put together a short summary of our findings and thoughts to help provide some context.