Name and Shame: A Comparative and International Analysis of Whistleblowing Laws

Name and Shame practices consist of publicly identifying an individual or corporate entity that is breaking the law. These practices are also called whistleblowing in the legal vocabulary. Already known in Roman times, they have developed throughout the centuries and were formally recognized in the European Union Directive of 23 October 2019 on the ‘protection of persons who report breaches of Union law’. Although EU Member States were supposed to transpose this directive by 17 December 2021, the transposition process is very slow and so far very few countries have adopted a corresponding law. In this context, this article presents this important EU directive and a panorama of whistleblower laws in several sample countries, three covered by the EU Directive (Germany, Spain, France), and three outside its scope (the US, the UK, Japan). This article also offers some reflections on general key aspects of whistleblowing: the defense of the targeted entities, whether a criminal offence can be committed for the purpose of whistleblowing, the key features of a whistleblowing system, and the matters subject to whistleblowing.