Transparency International and its partners in Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Poland propose a two-year project to foster an enabling environment for whistleblower protection (SAFE4Whistleblowers II). This initiative aims to scale up the EU-funded SAFE4Whistleblowers project, which is currently active in the Czech Republic, France, Ireland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Slovakia. The project expansion will leverage the outputs, tools, findings, and lessons learned from the SAFE4Whistleblowers project, extending its impact to four additional EU countries: Germany, Hungary, Italy and Poland. These four countries were among the last to adopt laws to transpose the EU Whistleblowing Directive, and all have shortcomings. Whistleblower protection is new to Germany and Poland, so the general public and all the other stakeholders involved in implementing the new law will have a lot to learn in little time. While Hungary and Italy have had a whistleblower protection legal framework for several years, implementation challenges have already been identified in Hungary and Italy.

 

The project aims to address five key challenges:

(1) the lack of awareness and trust in reporting channels and whistleblower protection;

(2) the insufficient capacity of civil society, public, and private organizations to implement the applicable rules correctly;

(3) the lack of available data to assess the effectiveness of whistleblowing laws;

(4) the lack of knowledge and capacity of competent authorities and enforcement agencies to implement and enforce whistleblower protection laws coherently; and

(5) the risks of incoherence in the implementation of these laws, both within and across EU member states, which could undermine the effectiveness of the Whistleblowing Directive.