‘J’accuse!’: whistleblowing, critical citizenship and the EU directive on whistleblowers’ protection

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite the enactment of legislation on public interest disclosures, whistleblowers still face significant retaliation. Perceptions and expectations of loyalty to a firm, organisation or a government continue to be seen as antithetical to ‘voice’, that is, the disclosure of wrongdoing, thereby triggering strategies of organisational exit and punishment. Real change can occur if whistleblowing is elevated to a civic duty of equal importance to other civic duties, such as to protect and defend the rule of law, human rights and democracy and to report suspected criminality to authorities. In this article, I justify whistleblowing on a good citizenship concept which transcends particular national institutional characteristics and critically examine the content and contribution of the European Union’s Directive on Whistleblower protection. By deploying a tripartite lens blending analytical questions and a discoursive theoretical perspective with a comparative assessment of instruments in the Member States and the EU, the discussion makes the case for the urgent change in the culture of punitive treatment of whistleblowers in the European Union and for further institutional reform when the Directive is reviewed in the future.