Targeting Whistleblowers

Whistleblowers are having a tough time in liberal democracies, and journalists are feeling the heat. In a morning scene reminiscent of the dark days of Emergency in India in 1975-77, leading newspapers in Australia last Monday came out with blacked out front pages. Back in the Seventies, readers in India knew from a blacked out news item or editorial that government censors had taken offense; now it is the turn of bemused readers in Australia to wonder what spurred their fiercely competitive newspapers to close ranks in such unprecedented manner. The media pushback is against measures by successive governments in Australia to penalize whistleblowing, and lately in criminalizing investigative journalism based on whistleblower leaks. There has been consternation in Australian media ever since police raids were conducted in June this year on the Sydney headquarters of Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the home of a News Corp Australia journalist. The ‘offending’ stories dealt with alleged war crimes and attempt by a government agency to spy on Australian citizens. Concerned journalists are now saying it is becoming impossible to investigate and expose government wrongdoing in this ‘culture of secrecy’ they are faced with. They point to over 60 laws related to secrecy and espionage that the Australian Parliament has passed in the last two decades. Whistleblower protection laws are currently being reviewed, but the writing is already on the wall. There is a growing perception in Australia that decreasing transparency and accountability are undermining the people’s right to know. The tough anti-spying legislation passed last year has galvanized media bodies to demand exemption for journalists doing stories on inside information provided by whistleblowers; as it is, whistleblowers are increasingly being treated like criminals, like the one facing a staggering 161 years in jail for revealing abuse of power by the Australian Tax Office. ABC managing director David Anderson has gone so far as to say that Australia is on course to become “the world’s most secretive democracy”. Unfazed, the government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison has argued that ‘no one is above the law’, and three journalists may well be prosecuted as a fallout of the raids. Apart from moving the courts, media and civil rights groups are coming together in platforms like the ‘Right to Know Coalition’ which spearheaded the campaign on Monday and received support from several radio, TV and online entities.

Meanwhile, across the Pacific, the Trump administration in US is breathing fire against whistleblowers. Democrats in the Congress are conducting an investigation whether President Donald Trump should be impeached for pressurizing Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden who is the likely Democrat challenger to Trump in 2020 US presidential election. At least two intelligence officials are known to have blown the whistle on Trump’s telephone calls to Zelenskiy, urging him to probe Biden junior’s role on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, while simultaneously indicating that ‘information will be rewarded’ by release of military aid to Ukraine (which Congress had sanctioned anyway). As it is illegal to seek foreign help in US domestic election, President Trump is on a sticky wicket, which is why he is raging against the whistleblowers and demanding their public identification for making his “perfectly legitimate calls to probe Biden’s corruption sound terrible”. In the US, unlike public or corporate whistleblowing which can be lawful, blowing the whistle on government misdeed can be legally complicated if there was unauthorized access and disclosure of information; it is understood that a whistleblower ought to approach internal grievance redressal channels before approaching the press. Compare this to the position in India, where Parliament passed a whistleblower protection law back in February 2014, but then the government had second thoughts and tweaked the law but the amendment bill thereafter got stuck in Rajya Sabha. Till date, the whistleblower protection law has not been put into effect — meanwhile, nearly 70 whistleblowers have been murdered with impunity in India since 2003, and no lessons seem to have been learned from the brutal killings of the likes of Satyendra Dubey and Shanmugham Manjunath. Rather, the proposed amended law gives no protection to whistleblowers from penalty for making disclosure to media! The only saving grace has been a Supreme Court ruling in 2013 that the identity of a whistleblower cannot be revealed during trial process. It is clear though that the lot of whistleblowers will be hard even in liberal democracies, because governments are now using the ‘security’ argument to put their activities under wraps from the public gaze. This has serious implications for transparency in public life and press freedom.

Also Watch: Broad daylight Smuggling of Timbers near Bordumsa-Pengri Road