Summary: Governments often fail to protect whistleblowers and instead subject them to various forms of retaliation, including prosecution, for disclosing information governments wrongly want to keep secret. This includes information about human rights violations.A panel of speakers with first-hand knowledge of these issues will talk about the experience of whistleblowers who face retaliation for their actions. They will explore how whistleblowers can be protected, and by extension protect the public’s right to information. This includes implementing measures such as those laid out in the Global Principles on National Security and the Right to Information (“Tshwane Principles”). These principles, which gained the support of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, provide critical guidance for ensuring that the public’s ‘right to know’ is protected.Chaired by Michael Garcia Bochenek, senior director of international law and policy at Amnesty International.The panel:Frank La Rue has been the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression since 2008. He has worked extensively on a range of freedom of opinion and expression issues, including the links between the right to access to information and the right to truth. La Rue participated in the development of the Tshwane Principles. He has worked on human rights for over 30 years and is the founder of the Center for Legal Action for Human Rights (CALDH) in Washington DC and Guatemala. He also brought the first genocide case against the military dictatorship in Guatemala and has previously served as a presidential commissioner for human rights in Guatemala, as a human rights adviser to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Guatemala, as president of the governing board of the Centro-American Institute of Social Democracy Studies and as a consultant to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.Avigdor Feldman has practiced law since 1974 and obtained his master’s in civil rights in 1985. He worked for the Israeli Association for Civil Rights (ACRI), is a key founder of B’Tselem (The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), and co-founded the Public Committee Against torture in Israel (PCATI). He founded the Litigation Center of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel and received the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights Award in 1991. He has worked on many prominent criminal cases related to civil rights and of a political nature including Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear whistleblower who was abducted by Mossad agents in 1986 and brought to trial in Israel, charged for leaking information about Israel’s nuclear capacity to The Sunday Times newspaper. He represents Vanunu today mainly relating to a string of punitive restrictions, which include barring him from leaving Israel, and which, after over ten years of appeals to the Supreme Court, remain in force. Feldman has petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court many times on behalf of human rights organizations including in a case calling for a judicial inquiry into the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982; the torture case relating to the use of physical force in Israel’s General Security Service’s interrogations; and Israel’s targeted killings police in 2006.Peter Hounam is a British investigative journalist who has worked for The Sunday Times, The Mirror, the London Evening Standard, and the BBC, and has also published several books including The Woman from Mossad: The Story of Mordechai Vanunu and the Israeli Nuclear Program. Hounam interviewed Mordechai Vanunu in Australia in 1986 and, with other members of The Sunday Times Insight Team, investigated his story of the inside workings of Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant. The story was published that September but beforehand Vanunu was abducted by Israeli secret service (Mossad). On behalf of The Sunday Times and the BBC, Hounam went to Israel for Vanunu‘s release from his 18-year prison sent
