The Ministry of Justice received 81 external notifications under the Whistleblower Protection Act last year. Twenty of them were assessed as justified and forwarded to other authorities. The head of the ministry’s anti-corruption department, Jiří Kapras, said this today at a press conference of the organisation Oživení, which runs a whistleblower support centre. According to the head of the organisation, Šarka Zvěřina Trunkátová, political influences have so far entered the law and this situation may be changed in the future by court decisions.
According to research by Behavio, the results of which were presented today by Revival, over the past three years people’s scepticism that reporting illegal activity in the workplace would lead to anything has increased. A total of 40 per cent of respondents thought reporting would not solve anything anyway, another 32 would not take action for fear of losing their jobs and 15 per cent said they were “not whistleblowers”. Those who had experienced dishonesty in the workplace most often discussed the situation with their family or other colleagues. One-fifth did not address their findings at all, another fifth went to a supervisor, and only two percent contacted the police.
“It is necessary to wait until the law comes into force, then the perception of whistleblowing may change a bit. This is quite a big breakthrough,” Kapras said of the survey results. He reminded that a whistleblower can choose whether to trust their employer’s internal whistleblowing system or turn to the external system of the Ministry of Justice or law enforcement authorities when in doubt about sufficient protection. In all of these cases, the law, which has been in effect since last August, entitles the whistleblower to protection against employer retaliation.
Trunkat also believes that the public does not yet have enough experience with the law and the protection it guarantees. She also said that there is a great reluctance of people in the Czech Republic to formally address anything. For whistleblowers from the ranks of state officials, political influences also come into play and the political representation itself is reserved about the law.
According to Trunkátová, unequivocal court rulings such as in the case of whistleblower Pavel Kodym can help in this regard. Last year, the former head of the Office for Access to Transport Infrastructure succeeded in an administrative lawsuit challenging the illegality of the revocation of his reappointment, which Transport Minister Martin Kupka (ODS) withdrew from consideration by the government immediately after learning that Kodym had alerted the European Commission to possible illegal subsidies for ČD.
Kodym himself also said today that the only thing the whistleblowers can rely on is an independent court. “They have to consider who they are going against and what the consequences will be. That they are committing political suicide. I have been labelled a troublemaker and you have that label for life,” he told his followers. He advised them to contact Revival or Transparency International for advice on how to proceed. “Whistleblowing is a huge risk,” he said. He added that he may have been extremely lucky with his lawyers and the fact that his type of administrative action could be heard on an expedited basis. Despite his success in court, he estimated that the award of legal costs would cover about ten percent of the amount he actually spent on lawyers.
Behavio’s research found that 44 percent of employees do not know how to report wrongdoing at their company at all. According to Trunkátová, many places only fulfil their legal obligation formally by writing about the information channels on their website and failing to train employees. “If the obliged entities remain in this formal attitude, the law will be used minimally,” she noted. She said the situation is different in companies that are used to doing business in the West. They had already protected their whistleblowers before the Czech law was adopted.
Source: CTK
