Employment Practice
Alert: draft law on the protection of whistleblowers
We have prepared an alert regarding the recently published draft act on the protection of persons reporting breaches of the law implementing the Directive (EU) 2019/1937 of the European Parliament and of the Council (EU) 2019/1937 of 23 October 2019 on the protection of persons who report breaches of EU law.
The project was submitted for public consultations, which are to end on November 17, 2021. We plan to submit our comments. This means that it is likely that the final draft will be considered just before the deadline for implementing the Directive and there may be little time left to prepare for the new requirements. In particular, concerns are raised by the extremely short period of entry into force of the new regulations, i.e. 14 days from the date of their announcement and, as it seems, that date would apply to entities employing at least 250 employees. The sanction for the failure to comply with obligations, i.e. failure to establish an internal procedure for reporting violations of the law and following-up, or establishing a procedure in violation of the requirements, would be a fine, restriction of liberty or imprisonment for up to 3 years.
In the Alert, we have also included our initial comments on the draft and compiled the issues that raise doubts, taking into account practical implementation aspects.
