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In a room where, people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot. - Czeslaw Milosz

Whistle Blow Whistleblowing - the term whistleblowing, comprising of the words whistle and blow, historically derives from Anglo-Saxon law and its origins are rooted in referees stopping a game when someone fouls by blowing a whistle or police officers blowing a whistle when someone commits a crime to attract the attention of the public.1 The term itself has evolved over time and has gained the meaning pf disclosing wrongdoing or reporting faulty behaviors. The term whistleblowing does not have an exact translation in the Turkish language; therefore, in many Turkish resources, the term is used as is (whistleblowing). The most accurate use of the term in the Turkish language is bilgi uurma, which refers to transmitting related information.

What is Whistleblowing?

This question does not have an exact answer in Turkish law since, unlike in the European Union (the EU), there is no specific piece of legislation in Turkey that regulates whistleblowing. While the concepts of disclosing wrongdoing, reporting faulty behaviors, and leniency processes, among others, are regulated under various pieces of legislation in Turkey, because the exact term bilgi uurma / whistleblowing is not referred to under any legislation, there is no definition for the term in Turkish law.

As a result, the definitions for the term provided by the international organizations to which Turkey is a member will guide us in determining the meaning of whistleblowing. The International Labour Organization (ILO), to which Turkey became a member in 1932, defines whistleblowing as the reporting by employees or former employees of illegal, irregular, dangerous or unethical practices by employers.2

This definition offered by the ILO only regulates employees or former employees, but is it enough to limit the regulation to only employees or formeremployees and only provide protection to them, or should the term encompass a wider range of people? Considering the recent legislative amendments, especially in the EU, European legislators may have already answered this question.

Whistleblowing in the EU

The EU adopted the Directive on the Protection of Persons Who Report Breaches of Union Law on 7 October 2019 (Directive), which entered into force on 16 December 2019. The Directive provides for the implementation of new comprehensive EU-wide rules on whistleblower protections. One of the most striking elements of the Directive is that it grants protection to a wide range of potential whistleblowers, including job applicants, contractors, volunteers, former workers, and board members, as well as individuals who assist whistleblowers such as colleagues and relatives and even journalists. Through the Directive, this wide range of individuals are protected from employment termination, degradation, transfer or change of workplace, and other discrimination.

Another welcoming feature of the Directive is that its scope has been expanded. Whistleblowers will be able to sound the alarm on a broad range of issues and remain protected from recrimination.3 It now includes protection for reports of wrongdoing related to EU law, such as tax fraud, money laundering, product and road safety, public health, and even hot topics such as environmental protection and data protection. The European Commission is encouraging national legislators to extend this scope even further by stating that Member States are free to extend these rules to other areas.4 This effort from the European Commission is promising as it sets forth certain requirements to be met by member countries while also providing flexibility for member countries to respond to what their society actually needs. As the deadline for member countries to transform theDirective into national law is December 2021, many member countries are already working on legislative amendments. The Directive itself and the amendments being drafted by EU member countries to comply with the Directive may have an impact on Turkey as well, as was the case with the EU data protection related legislation. That said, let`s take a look at where Turkey currently stands in terms of whistleblowing.

Whistleblowing in Turkey

i. The UN Convention

Turkey ratified the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UN Convention) on 9 November 2006. According to Article 90 of the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey, duly ratified international agreements have the force of law. In this respect, Article 33 of the UN Convention calls for the adoption of national legislation to combat the unjustified treatment of whistleblowers who report to the competent authorities. However, no specific national regulations governing the procedures for whistleblowing have been adopted in Turkey yet. Still, as can be seen below, there are certain pieces of legislation in Turkey that provide protection for whistleblowers.

ii. The ILO Convention

Turkey also ratified the ILOs Termination of the Employment Convention numbered C158 (ILO Convention) on 4 January 1995, and the ILO Convention entered into force twelve months after its ratification was registered as law. Article 5 of the ILO Convention provides that the filing of a complaint or the participation in proceedings against an employer for violation of laws or regulations or recourse to the competent administrative authorities should not constitute valid reasons for termination. A very similar provision is also available in the Turkish Labor Law,5 as explained below.

iii. The Turkish Penal Code

There are certain provisions under the Turkish Penal Code6 in relation to the reporting of crimes. According to the Turkish Penal Code, any person who fails to report an offence that is in progress to the relevant authority shall be sentenced to a penalty of imprisonment for a term of up to one year. Furthermore, any person who fails to notify the relevant authority of any offence that has already been committed but where it is still possible to limit its consequences shall be sentenced according to the provisions of the abovementioned section. One should note that this reporting provision is vaguely drafted and there are a very limited number of precedents, evidencing that it is an ineffective provision.

iv. The Labor Law

The Labor Law provides protection to employees if they file a complaint against their employer to the competent administrative or judicial authorities to follow up his/her rights stemming from legislation or the employees employment contract. If the employer terminates the employment contract because of this complaint, then the termination will not be deemed a valid reason under the Labor Law. However, this protection is only in relation to filing complaints against employers. So, what happens in cases where an employee reports a co-worker? What should the employee do if he/she witnesses wrongdoing at the workplace by another co-worker?

There is neither a specific rule nor any right vested to employees to report such behaviors that would provide them protection, but the Labor Law and the Turkish Code of Obligations7 impose a duty of loyalty on employees. In accordance with the Labor Law, acts such as abuse of the employers trust, theft, or the disclosure of an employers confidential and professional secrets, which are in contravention of the duty of loyalty, aredeemed just grounds for termination of an employment agreement by the employer.

As per Article 396 of the Turkish Code of Obligations, employees are also obliged to do their work diligently and to act loyally by protecting the legitimate interests of the employer. In practice, if an employee witnesses any wrongdoing at the workplace by another co-worker, such employee should report this to his/ her employer in accordance with the duty of loyalty

To Blow the Whistle or Not

If a person asks himself whether or not to blow the whistle, this means that he/ she is afraid of the consequences of whistleblowing as it is said the decision to blow the whistle requires great moral courage.8

There is an inherent duty to blow the whistle if one witnesses actions that may danger the wellbeing and security of society, thievery, fraud, or any situation that may breach ethical rules, morals, laws, regulations and state policies, or discrimination against gender, nation, religion, and race. In summary, all matters that would benefit public welfare should be considered within the scope of whistleblowing.9 But what if the national legislation does not provide sufficient protection to whistleblowers? In such case, it is the duty of companies, organizations, and unions to provide such protection through internal directives and policies because it is society who suffers when people remain silent against wrongdoing. In order to encourage whistleblowing, whistleblowers must be provided sufficient protection and an effective policy for whistleblowing should be adopted.10 More people are using their companies ethics procedures to report misconduct, and more people are filing whistle-blower claims.11

In Turkey, many global entities that deem themselves transparent and accountable are adopting internal rules and procedures for whistleblowing and for eliminating retaliation. With guidance from the Directive and the corporate entities taking the lead in the support for whistleblowing, individuals may be more capable of blowing the whistle even when local legislation has yet to be seen.

Originally posted here:
Whistleblowing in the European Union and Turkey - Lexology

This week, the World Health Organization warned that Europe is facing exponential increases in COVID-19 cases. In just the past ten days, the continent has recorded over one million new cases, bringing the total since the start of the pandemic to over seven million.

As Europe emerges as an epicenter of a global resurgence of COVID-19, the EU is pursuing a policy leading to deaths on an unprecedented scale, far surpassing the 200,000 deaths this spring.

After lockdowns reversed the initial surge of COVID-19 in Europe, governments across the continent boasted that they had controlled the virus. As Europes central banks handed out bailouts of 1.25 trillion for the Eurozone and 645 billion in Britain, and the EU negotiated a 750 billion corporate bailout, they demanded workers return to work and youth to school. The priority, they insisted, was avoiding a new lockdown.

All these arguments stand completely exposed. The number of daily new cases in Europe has surged past 150,000, as the virus explodes out of control. France is declaring over 30,000, Britain nearly 20,000, the Czech Republic nearly 10,000, Italy 9,000, Belgium, Poland and the Netherlands 8,000 and Germany 7,000. Authorities report 13,000 new cases daily in Spain, until recently Europes worst-hit country, but newspapers are reporting that regional governments are cutting thousands of cases out of their totals.

Even if the contagion were to remain at its current levels, at 4.5 million cases per month, it would overwhelm Europes health care system. However, EU governments continue to reject a general shelter-at-home or lockdown orderdemanding instead that non-essential workers go back to work, to produce profits on the massive amounts of financial capital being handed over to major corporations. The EU sacrificed workers health and lives to the profits of the financial aristocracy.

Officials in Spain, Britain and France are announcing late-night curfews or restrictions on mobility in selected cities, in an attempt to reassure an increasingly angry and fearful public. From Madrid to Marseille, Paris and Liverpool, however, these curfews have one thing in common: they force workers and youth to keep going as before to work and school, where the vast majority of infections take place. With this policy, the number of new cases will keep rising exponentially.

As the northern hemisphere heads into winterthe season when people stay inside more in poorly ventilated areas and diseases like COVID-19 spread and kill the most rapidlya disaster is looming in Europe and around the world.

The worst can be averted only via the political mobilization of the European and international working class. Indeed, it was only the independent intervention of the working class that compelled the adoption of lockdown policies this spring in Europe, which epidemiologists estimate saved the lives of millions. Wildcat strikes starting at Fiats Pomigliano auto plant and spreading to steel, engineering and food processing plants in Italy and much of Europe shut down international supply chains and forced EU governments to adopt shelter-at-home orders.

After over 1 million COVID-19 deaths worldwide, including over 230,000 in Europe, explosive social opposition is building. Mass youth protests have erupted against back-to-school policies in Greece and Poland, as well as strikes by nurses in Spain and France demanding more resources and better pay to deal with the pandemic. Health workers and professionals are denouncing the herd immunity policies adopted by governments around the world, which Britains internationally recognized medical journal, theLancet, subjected to devastating and unambiguous criticism.

The Lancet wrote, The arrival of a second wave and the realisation of the challenges ahead has led to renewed interest in a so-called herd immunity approach, which suggests allowing a large uncontrolled outbreak in the low-risk population while protecting the vulnerable. Proponents suggest this would lead to the development of infection-acquired population immunity in the low-risk population, which will eventually protect the vulnerable. This is a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.

Uncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity and mortality across the whole population, theLancet warned. It added that this threatens to overwhelm the ability of health care systems to provide acute and routine care, would ensure recurrent epidemics, and risks further exacerbating the socioeconomic inequities ... already laid bare by the pandemic.

The Lancet wrote that the stay-at-home measures carried out earlier in the year were essential to reduce mortality, prevent health-care services from being overwhelmed, and buy time to set up pandemic response systems to suppress transmission following lock-down.

Seven months after lock-downs began across Europe this spring, there is no longer any question that the closure of non-essential businesses, combined with massive investments public health, testing, quarantine and contact tracing are the only scientific policy to combat the virus. What remains to be clarified is the political program on which the growing opposition in the working class can be turned in a conscious struggle to avert a truly horrific loss of life. A scientific policy can only be implemented through the international unification and mobilization of the working class in a struggle for socialism.

Only a massive, revolutionary assault on capitalist property can overcome the entrenched economic interests that have dictated a murderous policy on COVID-19. The inescapable conclusion of theLancets article is that EU governments back-to-work, back-to-school policy was a false, anti-scientific policy, foisted on workers and youth by the financial aristocracy based on lies.

EU officials knew their policies would lead to mass deaths. In March, as strikes forced them to agree to lock-downs, the German Interior Ministry prepared a classified report that over 1 million Germans could die in 2020 of COVID-19 without emergency measures. Officials at a French national security council meeting reportedly heard top-secret warnings of hundreds of thousands of deaths. However, these warnings were hidden from the population and buried by the media, so that EU banks and governments could push workers back to work and restart the flow of profits.

Europes union bureaucracies and allied middle class parties, like Germanys Left Party, Podemos in Spain, or Frances New Anti-capitalist Party, are implicated in this criminal policy. After doing nothing to mobilize workers this spring, they helped implement the back-to-work policy. After the German and French unions signed a statement this summer endorsing EU bailouts, they expect that billions in bailout funds will pass through banks and works councils into their stock portfolios and union coffers, and are leaving thousands or millions of workers to die.

The sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) have called for workers and youth to organize safety committees in workplaces and schools, independently of the unions, to oppose the herd immunity policies of the ruling class. As the virus tears through the population, it is clear that defending health and safety in individual workplaces or schools is impossible without a collective, revolutionary strategy to oppose the financial aristocracys strategy of mass infection and death.

This requires building the ICFI as the revolutionary leadership in the international working class, to lay the political basis for mass, coordinated strike actions, systematic opposition and the taking of power to impound the necessary resources for a scientific and humane fight against COVID-19. This includes a shelter-at-home policy for youth and all non-essential workers, backed by financing for workers and small businesses no longer able to operate. It demands a revolutionary struggle by the working class to bring down the EU and replace it with the United Socialist States of Europe.

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Mobilize the working class against the European Union's herd immunity policies! - WSWS

INTRODUCTION

SOLIDAR is a network of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) that are working to improve economic and social rights inside and outside of Europe. On an international level, SOLIDAR is immersed in the process to create the SOLIDAR Network through the Organising International SOLIDARity (OIS) programme, the purpose of which is to strengthen the collaboration between our members and their capacities for greater, more fruitful impact. The OIS programme is strongly focussed on Central America. Specifically, on a national level, our priority countries are Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

One goal of the OIS programme is to monitor the progress of economic and social rights in Central America. The current situation with respect to the spread of COVID-19 in Central America has led to greater uncertainty and alarm regarding the impact of the pandemic on the region, which is one of the most polarised in the world. Through the SOLIDAR Network, we have carried out an initial analysis of the measures that are currently being implemented to combat COVID-19 and how these are contributing to the dilapidation of an already fragile social structure, while also putting at risk the achievement of these countries development objectives and of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

In this context, the SOLIDAR Network in Central America calls on their governments, the international community and the EU to redouble their efforts in ensuring the attainment of the SDGs, paying special regards to:

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Impact of COVID-19 on Central America: Analysis and recommendations for the European Union - Costa Rica - ReliefWeb

The decision, which is final and cannot be appealed, is part of a string of long-running disputes between Boeing and Airbus.

GENEVA, Switzerland World Trade Organization arbitrators said Tuesday that the European Union can sanction up to $4 billion in U.S. goods over Washington's illegal support for plane maker Boeing.

The ruling, which could inflame Trump administration criticism of the Geneva-based trade body, amounts to one of the largest penalties handed down by the WTO. It comes a year after another ruling authorized billions in penalties against the European Union over support for Boeing rival Airbus.

The decision, which is final and cannot be appealed, dates back to 2006 and is part of a string of long-running disputes between the two plane-making giants at the Geneva trade body.

The arbitrators were tasked with setting a dollar value in sanctions such as tariffs that the EU could impose a year after the WTOs appellate body found that Boeing had received at least $5 billion in subsidies that were prohibited under international trade rules.

The United States had argued that the illegal support merited no more than $412 million in penalties, while the EU had countered that they deserved some $8 billion. The award in essence was 10 times more than what the U.S. had claimed, and half that the EU wanted.

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Trade body says EU can sanction $4B worth of US goods, including Boeing jets - KING5.com

A European Union flag and a U.K. flag during a special meeting of the European Council on November 25, 2018 in Brussels, Belgium. AFP via Getty Images

The U.K. and the European Union have now entered either their ultimate bluffing session before striking a last-minute compromise on their future relationship, or the inexorable slide toward the no-deal Brexit both sides promised to avoid ever since the 2016 U.K. referendum on the countrys membership.

A summit of EU leaders on Thursday sternly noted that progress on the key issues of interest to the Union [was] still not sufficient for an agreement to be reached, and called on the U.K. to make the necessary moves to make an agreement possible.

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson then retorted on Friday that the EU had refused to negotiate seriously, and said that the U.K. would get ready for arrangements with its biggest trade partner that would be more like Australia from January 1 next year, when the so-called transition period of the countrys exit from the union expires.

Translation from the two-day drama: Things go on as usual, albeit with heightened rhetoric and now tighter deadlines.

Read: U.K. will quit talks if no trade deal agreed upon by Oct. 15, Boris Johnson said in September

What mattered in Johnsons BBC interview is what he didnt say: After warning two weeks ago that he would walk away from the long-running trade talks if no progress had been made before the EU summit, Johnson is, in fact, ready to keep talking despite the absence of progress. His intended threat of a no-deal Brexit came with the caveat, repeated three times in the six-minute interview, that it would only happen unless some fundamental change of approach is perceptible on the EU side.

The EU, for its part, had urged the U.K. to keep talking, and instructed its key negotiator Michel Barnier to keep doing what he has been doing for months. And Barnier said indeed that he would be in London next week to do just that, in a meeting with his counterpart, the U.K. Brexit negotiator David Frost.

Read: Ursula von der Leyen self-isolates after mixing with all 27 EU presidents and prime ministers from the bloc

Talking about what? That will be the real question. The no-deal scenario is constantly described by Johnson and other U.K. governments ministers as the Australian option, meaning that the U.K. would simply trade with the EU according to the very basic, and costlier, rules of the World Trade Organization. But that is seemingly ignoring that Australia has a range of other agreements and bilateral deals with the EU which it deems so unsatisfying that it engaged in proper free-trade negotiations with the union two years ago.

Barnier, in any case, is unlikely to come back to London just to talk about the wine trade or the mutual exchange of passenger records topics covered by two of the current EU-Australia agreements.

So the U.K.-EU comprehensive trade treaty that both sides swear they want to conclude will once again depend on whether or not European fishermen will be able to keep trawling in British waters, what kind of guarantees the U.K. will give the EU that it wont engage in a race to the bottom in environmental or social regulations, and what assurances the two sides will provide each other that the disputes will be dealt with in good faith and following strict legality.

Read: U.K. asks consumers to go easy on fish & chips its all about Brexit, but theres a catch

What has been surprising in the last two days is that the official tone set by EU leaders and Johnson was more dramatic than the upbeat noises emanating from the two sides negotiating teams in the preceding days. That suggests that the rhetoric ramp-up is more political than technical, and that a deal might be in sight after all, once everyone has taken the ultimate posture.

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It was billed as the final showdown between the EU and U.K. this is what will happen next - MarketWatch