‘Whistleblowers' who disclose state wrongdoing in the public interest should be protected from retaliation, provided they acted in good faith and followed procedures, a committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) said in a draft resolution made public today.
PACE's Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, adopting a report on "National security and access to information" today in Strasbourg on the fringe of the PACE plenary session, urged governments in the Council of Europe's 47 member states to align their laws with a set of global principles on this topic agreed earlier this month by experts, civil society, academia and national security practitioners.
Access to information should be granted where public interest in the information in question outweighs the authorities' interest in keeping it secret, including when such information "would make an important contribution to an on-going public debate", the committee said. (more...)
