French whistleblower legislation establishes a unified legal regime for the treatment of reports and for the protection of whistleblowers. Drawing on French whistleblower law, recently amended by the transposition of Directive 2019/1937 of 23 October 2019, this article examines whether the specific features of whistleblowing in relation to public health and environmental risks are adequately addressed by this unified regime. The article identifies four key factors for the effective handling of whistleblowing relating to public health and the environment: (1) the possibility of protecting whistleblowers who report facts gathered outside the workplace; (2) the possibility of protecting legal persons as whistleblowers; (3) the possibility of carrying out in-depth investigations to characterise the reality of the risks reported; and (4) the possibility of archiving whistleblowing in order to detect weak signals of risks over the long term. In these four areas, the article provides a nuanced diagnosis of the situation in French law and offers suggestions for improvement.

The act of whistleblowing is not common in Nigeria; this can be attributed to the cultural norms of Nigerian society where deference is paid to those in positions of power and it is often viewed as taboo to speak up against them. This problem of not speaking up is further compounded by the lack of robust whistleblowing legislation which protects whistleblowers from reprisals. The need to protect whistleblowers was brought to the forefront after the implementation in 2016 of the Nigerian stopgap policy on whistleblowing, leading to the Whistleblower Protection Bill proposed in 2019, legislation that seeks to provide wider protection to whistleblowers. This article examines this bill, identifying its limitations; it does not rehash previous scholarly debates about whether incentives are necessary, but rather focuses on bringing the Nigerian perspective to the fore, thus contributing to the existing literature in this area.

Despite its common usage, the meaning of ‘democratic’ in democratic intelligence oversight has rarely been spelled out. In this article, we situate questions regarding intelligence oversight within broader debates about the meanings and practices of democracy. We argue that the literature on intelligence oversight has tended to implicitly or explicitly follow liberal and technocratic ideas of democracy, which have limited the understanding of oversight both in academia and in practice. Thus, oversight is mostly understood as an expert, institutional and partially exclusive arrangement that is supposed to strike a balance between individual freedom and collective security, with the goal of establishing the legitimacy of and trust in intelligence work in a national setting. ‘Healthy’ or ‘efficient’ democratic oversight then becomes a matter of technical expertise, non-partisanship, and the ability to guard secrets. By analysing three moments of struggle around what counts as intelligence oversight across Germany, the UK, and the US, this article elucidates their democratic stakes. Through a practice-based approach, we argue that oversight takes much more agonistic, contentious, transnational, and public forms. However, these democratic practices reconfiguring oversight remain contested or contained by dominant views on what constitutes legitimate and effective intelligence oversight.

Section 159 of the South African Companies Act 71 of 2008 regulates corporate whistleblowing in companies registered under the act. This article critically evaluates section 159 to ascertain whether it adequately protects and encourages corporate whistleblowers. It compares this section with the whistleblower provisions in the Australian Corporations Act 2001, which have strongly influenced section 159 and which were recently reformed, and argues that in the light of the distressing levels of corporate corruption, the low reporting rates of wrongdoing and the widespread victimization of whistleblowers, there is a pronounced need to protect corporate whistleblowers in South Africa. It contends that section 159 does not go far enough in protecting and encouraging corporate whistleblowers, and calls for numerous important reforms to be urgently made.

The ethics of whistleblowing are complex and challenging. On the one hand, there are a strong set of moral reasons why someone ought to blow the whistle when he or she learns of wrongdoing. On the other hand, such actions typically come at a significant cost to the whistleblower and may not bring about any significant change. Both aspects prompt us to ask, why would I be a whistleblower? Emanuela Ceva and Michele Bocchiola's Is Whistleblowing a Duty? answers that question by arguing that one has an organizational duty to blow the whistle. Kate Kenny's Whistleblowing: Toward a New Theory reframes the question, showing how hard it has been for members of the international financial industry to blow the whistle and bring about any effective change to that industry. In this review essay, I suggest that analyses of whistleblowing need to take into account evolving technologies, the importance of loyalty, and special contexts such as whistleblowing in the national security sector.

The recent global financial crisis has demonstrated the ineffectiveness of traditional regulation in averting financial crime. Consequently the supervision of financial institutions has been increasingly re-evaluated and such endeavours have resulted in the reregulation of the sector in many jurisdictions. This article argues that, much as these strategies can be said to be laudable, until they emphasize engagement with the people who work in those institutions through making it possible for them to report corporate misconduct, these legislative paradigms will not avail much. As such, this article argues for the increased use of insiders through whistleblowing as a mechanism to support the exposure of illegal activities. By comparing the whistleblowing approaches adopted in South Africa and Switzerland, this article attempts to contribute to the standardization of approaches that can be used to enhance global financial sector transparency and minimize financial crime.

In 2014, the UN Human Rights Committee published its Concluding Observations on the United States’ fourth periodic report on the progress of the implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (UN Doc CCPR/C/SR/3061), in which also the US surveillance practices are criticised. The Committee’s insistence on the right to privacy and its exterritorial effect is an important first step, but it is not comprehensive, as by remaining within the individual rights framework the UN Human Rights Committee fails to sufficiently take into account the systemic challenges in play. Developing a constitution of the Internet would necessitate not only protecting individual fundamental rights against state interference, but protecting communicative spheres by guaranteeing institutional autonomies and subjecting all social spheres to democratic control; this also requires opening up spaces for a critical public, including whistleblowers, and establishing a right to cryptography – a crucial refraction in the polycentric panoptic schema.

Bioethicists are sometimes thought to have heightened obligations by virtue of the fact that their professional role addresses ethics or morals. For this reason it has been argued that bioethicists ought to “whistleblow”—that is, publicly expose the wrongful or potentially harmful activities of their employer—more often than do other kinds of employees. This article argues that bioethicists do indeed have a heightened obligation to whistleblow, but not because bioethicists have heightened moral obligations in general. Rather, the special duties of bioethicists to act as whistleblowers are best understood by examining the nature of the ethical dilemma typically encountered by private employees and showing why bioethicists do not encounter this dilemma in the same way. Whistleblowing is usually understood as a moral dilemma involving conflicting duties to two parties: the public and a private employer. However, this article argues that this way of understanding whistleblowing has the implication that professions whose members identify their employer as the public—such as government employees or public servants—cannot consider whistleblowing a moral dilemma, because obligations are ultimately owed to only one party: the public. The article contends that bioethicists—even when privately employed—are similar to government employees in the sense that they do not have obligations to defer to the judgments of those with private interests. Consequently, bioethicists may be considered to have a special duty to whistleblow, although for different reasons than those usually cited.