The fight over the law isn’t quite big enough to make the front page. There will be no emotional floor speeches, hearings that go viral, or celebrity advocates. It will keep going badly—fired workers, lost reports, and years of lawsuits—until enough people in enough countries decide that something needs to change. Protecting people who blow the whistle has been that fight in 2026, and it is moving faster than most people think.
People who report wrongdoing are now protected by the law in about 150 countries. That number makes me feel better. It’s not really. In many of those countries, “protection” only means a few lines buried deep in a labor law. There is no dedicated enforcement body, no way to report abuse anonymously, and no real way to get help when an employer makes it hard for someone to do their job. What a law says on paper is not the same as what it does.
This year things have changed because governments are starting to deal with that gap in a more concrete way. In the UK, two private members’ bills were introduced in both houses of parliament in June that were meant to stop SLAPPs, which are strategic lawsuits against public participation. These are the kinds of lawsuits that can cost a journalist or whistleblower a million pounds in fees before the case even ends. The bills, which were introduced by Conservatives who seemed to have support from across the party line, would let defendants ask for early dismissal of cases that involve public interest issues. It’s a real fix, but it’s not very wide.
Japan’s new whistleblowing law, which was passed in 2025 and started to apply this year, goes even further. It makes retaliation illegal and stops companies from trying to figure out who filed the report. South Africa is working on a bill that will strengthen both the protections and the steps that should be taken for disclosures to get to the right people. The Netherlands is making changes to its own rules. Since the middle of 2025, even the UAE has made regulated entities follow new rules. There’s a pattern here that’s not a mistake.
Enforcement fatigue is one of the things that’s causing this. Regulators in many places have seen the same thing happen over and over again: someone reports fraud or wrongdoing through the right channels, but investigations are held up or never start, and the person who spoke out is quietly ignored. In Italy, a municipal police officer who reported wrongdoing within the department was given less important tasks and worked in an unpleasant environment for a long time before a court ruled that the treatment was unfair. In Rwanda, a teacher who reported unpaid school fees was sent to a place far away from where she lived. It’s not an edge case here. These things show how retaliation really works: slowly, easily denied, and expensive to fight.
It’s hard to say enough about how heavy that reality is on your mind. When workers see a coworker speak out and then not show up to meetings, get passed over for a promotion, or quietly quit because of stress, they learn without anyone saying a word. That chilling effect is probably the biggest problem reformers are trying to fix. It’s harder to fix with laws than specific loopholes, but it’s still a real problem.
It’s possible that the momentum seen in 2026 will lead to real change. You might also have the same trouble following the new laws as you did with the old ones. The conversation has changed, that much is clear. No longer are governments debating whether to protect whistleblowers in general. They are talking about how to make protection work in real life, which is at least a more honest argument.
