No Protection for Whistleblowers

[unhappycamper]

http://watchingamerica.com/News/243742/no-protection-for-whistle-blowers/

The significance of the whistle-blower for a properly functioning democracy is beyond question. But even though Edward Snowden exposed the dangers of unregulated surveillance by intelligence agencies, no nation wants to grant him asylum. He is treated as if he were a dangerous criminal.

No Protection for Whistleblowers
Berliner Zeitung, Germany
By Christian Bommarius
Translated By Ron Argentati
4 August 2014
Edited by Gillian Palmer

In June 2013, more than 500 experts from 70 nations requested a global program of improved protection for whistleblowers at a meeting of the Council of Europe’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights in the South African city of Tshwane. In particular, they said whistleblowers should not be punished if the importance of their revelations outweighed continued secrecy. A few months later, in October 2013, the parliamentary assembly of the council recommended its 47 members change their national laws to comply with the recommendation.

On April 30, 2014, the committee of ministers accepted the suggestion and put it before all member states to implement. In a recently released “explanatory report” concerning the recommendation, the federal justice ministry called whistleblowing “a basic aspect of the freedom of expression and conscience,” and [stated that the government] should actively strive to make it easier for individuals to “report information about the dangers or the disadvantages of secrecy not in the public interest.”

In other words, the importance of the whistleblower to a properly functioning democracy is — at least as far as Europeans are concerned — beyond question and the necessity of protecting whistleblowers is recognized by no less than the current conservative-liberal German coalition government.

Fled Like a Persecuted Animal

If that is really so, then the German government has to consider it intolerable that the most successful and significant whistleblower in history — former NSA employee Edward Snowden — has been on the run from the U.S. criminal justice system for more than a year, finding only temporary asylum in Moscow, and that the man who complained about the death of privacy, but also empirically proved his accusations beyond any doubt and showed how democracy was being endangered by government agency spying, was forced to seek refuge in — of all places — neo-emperor Vladimir Putin's Russia. And all because he could no longer trust the rule of law in America and the Europeans wouldn't let him in.

[Thinkingabout]

1. Let's put this subject to sleep, we make the laws in the US, other nations can make their laws to

suit their needs. Snowden can be a whistleblower where ever he can get away with being a whistleblower, he is not afforded the protection of whistleblower status in the US since he was working in the security agency of the US. There is criminal charges which results, if he was not advised, then he is still responsible. Now if he should decide to blow the whistle on the group he is patsy for and the US Justice department wants to make a deal with him, then maybe this can happen. Let him plea bargain.