Impact Analysis German and European Whistleblowing Law

• Applicant: Dr. Simon Gerdemann
• Subject Area: Private Law ; Public Law
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 470338817

In recent years, the issue of "whistleblowing" has experienced an immense increase in importance, both in public discourse and in international research. Just twenty yeats ago, the term "whistleblower" was mostly known to a small circle of interested scholars. Now, cases like that of the famous whistleblower Edward Snowden, who brought his insider knowledge of the NSA's cross-border surveillance practices to the light of day in the summer of 2013, have moved the issue to the center of public interest in Germany and across Europe.Under the impression of steadily increasing legislative activity worldwide, the European Union has identified the comparatively young field of whistleblowing regulation as a legal matter in urgent need of reform, subjecting it to Union-wide regulation for the first time with the so-called "Whistleblowing Directive" of October 23, 2019 (Directive (EU) 2019/1937). The Member States‘ legislators are obliged to transpose this Directive into national law by December 17, 2021. In doing so, they are urged by the European Union to fundamentally revise their current national frameworks beyond the mere transposition of mandatory Union law requirements.It is already foreseeable that this process will lead to considerable changes in current legal systems throughout Europe and to associated consequences with regard to the frequency and forms of whistleblowing and the handling of national and European whistleblowers in pratice. The planned German Whistleblower Protection Act (HinSchG) also deliberately goes beyond a mere implementation of the Directive and aims at the first codification of a uniform German whistleblowing law as an independet area of law.The goal of the research project is to scientifically examine the most important facets of the new whistleblowing law and to identify potential for optimization relevant to legal policy on the basis of its jurisprudetial, empirical and institutional findings. Building on the applicant's preliminary work and network with European whistleblowing researchers, the project aims to contribute to establishing the field of whistleblowing research, which to date is still in its infancy in Germany. In three consecutive project years, a jurisprudential analysis of dogmatic changes and conflict lines, a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the institutional framework, and a legal and factual analysis of the effects of the new German whistleblowing law will be carried out. The results will be made available to experts, the interested public and political decision-makers.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants