WIN is delighted to announce that President Zelensky of Ukraine has vetoed Draft Law #3450 and has sent it back to the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament. The Draft Law was intended to be a positive reform to create a safe whistleblowing portal for reporting corruption, but last-minute amendments rendered it a “snitches” charter, overturning the existing protections, and putting a target on the back of anyone trying to report internally or externally.
Several Ukrainian and International organisations signed WIN’s Open Letter to President Zelensky to urge him to veto this bill. WIN’s Executive Director Anna Myers and Tom Devine, Legal Director of the Government Accountability Project in Washington DC, wrote an Opinion piece in the Kyiv Post earlier this week outlining how proposed amendments create a dangerous trap for whistleblowers.
WIN is delighted with this result and very appreciative of the work Ukrainian civil society organisations, like TI Ukraine and ACREC, are doing to to protect whistleblowers and for the efforts of the other organisations in our network, like the Government Accountability Project and Blueprint for Free Speech for supporting them and helping to push this forward.
WIN hopes the Rada will adopt a law that fulfils the intent of the original reform and we shall continue to do what we can to support civil society in Ukraine in their ongoing work.