[Content from Eurowhistle site here]
Whistleblowers contribute fundamentally to the detection of non-compliance and irregularities in various organizations worldwide. In doing so, they make an enormous contribution to organizational ethics and integrity and thus making our world a better place. Yet they are often at the mercy of retaliation. It is therefore in the interest of all of us to fully protect whistleblowers. However, protection can only be guaranteed if it is anchored in hard law and if organizations set up appropriate whistleblowing management systems.
EUROWHISTLE provides the first general overview of how certain regulations, where discretion was granted to the Member States, have been implemented in specific Member States of the EU. This allows interested persons to quickly gain an initial overview. Certainly, however, EUROWHISTLE can only provide a rough and non-binding overview and cannot replace legal advice in individual cases.
The Eurowhistle.eu project portal was designed by Prof. Dr. Bartosz Makowicz and his Team at Viadrina Compliance Center at the European University Viadrina and implemented with European partners. The project was supported by the KBA NotaSys Integrity Fund.
EUROWHISTLE works relatively simply. Its team has identified the points in the EU Whistleblowing Directive where the European Union has given Member States particular discretion in implementing the Directive. It is these aspects that can be regulated differently in the Member States, which can result in differences in the protection of whistleblowers and the design of whistleblowing management systems.
The team then searched for and found excellent partners in each member state of the European Union who agreed to describe briefly and in essence how the regulation was implemented in the Member State concerned, using a unified and standardized chart. From this data they have created a simple database and connected it to a search and comparison tool. In this way, users can quickly and easily select one or more Member States and check how the specific regulations have been implemented in the respective country.