On 23 April 2018, the European Commission published a proposal for a Directive on the protection of whistleblowers reporting on breaches of EU law, accompanied by an explanatory memorandum.

The Directive

The intention behind the proposal is to harmonise the minimum level of protection available to whistleblowers across the EU. It reflects the Commission’s view that whistleblowers can play an important role in exposing breaches of EU law, but they will often resist coming forward for fear of the legal and financial consequences which may occur. At present, legal protection for whistleblowers is fragmented and, in the Commission’s view, insufficient. In its explanatory memorandum, the Commission talks of ‘missed opportunities’ for preventing and detecting breaches of EU law where certain Member States currently have a lack of protection and argues that the harmonisation brought about by the draft Directive will contribute toward improving the business environment, increasing fairness in taxation and promoting labour rights.

The draft Directive applies to reports of breaches across a wide range of EU areas of law, including the protection of privacy and personal data, and security of network and information. It creates an obligation to establish internal channels and procedures to handle reports made by whistleblowers, which applies to entities that meet the prescribed thresholds. For those entities in the private sector, the threshold is 50 or more employees, or an annual turnover of EUR 10 million or more, although this does not apply to businesses offering financial services, for which there is no minimum threshold. Entities in the public sector will be caught if they are involved in state or regional administration, if they are responsible for municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants or if they are otherwise governed by public law.…

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