The legislation is said to mean employees in both the public and private sector can publicize corruption or other serious criminal issues occurring in their workplaces without fear of reprisals such as withheld wages, lessened career opportunities or termination.
While announced with some fanfare, Petter Tiger, chief executive of Lantero, a firm that constructs systems for secure, anonymous whistleblowing, told Sputnik the new law stops way short of implementing the recommendations from the public inquiry that was commissioned on the subject in 2015.
"The report said full legal protections should be extended to employees in any industry and allow whistleblowers to contact journalists or law enforcement directly.
"However, the new law excludes employees working in a number of sectors, even when those sectors receive part or all of their funding from the public. Also, under the law, an employee must approach their employer before the media or relevant authorities, and if their employer does not act, only then can the case be directed to public channels.
"There's almost zero change in the protections available to whistleblowers, and I think the government was only interested in appearing to be acting tough," Petter Tiger told Sputnik.
While Transparency International's 2015 Corruption Index listed Sweden as the third least corrupt nation in the world, there has been a sizeable increase in reported corruption in the country since 2010. In 2016, over 500 Swedish individuals and companies were implicated in involvement with offshore financial schemes in the Panama Papers, including clients of national banking giant Nordea. Finansinspektionen, the Swedish financial supervisory authority, subsequently investigated Handelsbanken, Nordea, SEB and Swedbank.
Later that year, Swedish trade union giant Kommunal, which owns a number of residential properties in Stockholm, was accused of renting out apartments to labor movement bosses instead of releasing them to the public housing queue.
Look at how the progressive tyranny #Sweden, "home of refugees", is treating a politically persecuted whistleblower. #PC in a nutshell. https://t.co/0xUhuIRVPK
— Synelly (@Synelly) December 8, 2016
That same year was also host to 'Macchiarinigate' in which renowned surgeon Paolo Macchiarini was invited to be a visiting professor at the prestigious Karolinska Institutet (KI) in Stockholm, and was also made a senior consultant at the Karolinska University Hospital. Concerns were raised by his colleagues over his professional competence, and alerted the KI chair.
However, the whistleblowers were threatened to dismissal. When the story was eventually reported in the media, the Swedish government sacked KI's entire board.
Whatever the issues with the new law, prospective whistleblowers in other European Union member states countries may wish for similar protections for themselves.
A report by Transparency International into whistleblower protections across Europe found many of the 28 countries lacked even basic safeguards for those seeking to expose wrongdoing. In 2016, cases such as the LuxLeaks affair demonstrated that whistleblowers can even face prison for making their disclosures.
