On January 20, Latvia passed into national law a whistleblower law, in accordance with the October 2019 European Union whistleblowing directive. Whistleblower advocates are praising the Latvian law because it includes protections specifically for climate whistleblowers.
The EU whistleblowing directive was passed on October 23, 2019. It mandates that every EU Member State must implement a whistleblower law by December 17, 2021. As of today, only seven countries have met the deadline: Denmark, Sweden, Cyprus, Lithuania, Malta, Portugal, and now Latvia.
The National Whistleblower Center (NWC) states that “Latvia stands alone as the only country to explicitly include protections for whistleblowers that bring forth evidence of climate crimes” and “serves as a model for its neighbors.” NWC urges the other EU Member States to adopt whistleblower laws that, among other things, include “anti-retaliatory protections” and “strong protections for climate whistleblowers.”
On December 1, 2021, international whistleblower expert Mark Worth wrote for WNN about how several EU Member States were not going to meet the Directive’s deadline. According to Worth, “Parliament members and officials in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany and Romania recently told the [European Center for Whistleblower Rights] that they do not have sufficient knowledge or experience to set up a whistleblower protection system. Political will, they acknowledged, also is lacking.”