Monrovia – More than sixty Anti-Corruption practitioners and government officials from West Africa will gather in Monrovia next week for a three-day regional workshop on Whistleblower and Witness Protection.
The meeting will be attended by heads of Anti-Corruption bodies, Police Chiefs from West Africa, Parliamentarians with oversight on corruption issues and representatives from international organizations involved with Whistleblower and Witness Protection activities.
The three-day regional gathering seeks to increase the knowledge of participants about the systems to protect whistleblowers and witnesses, to share experiences and lessons learned from other countries within the region and beyond on whistleblower and witness protection as well as identify practical priority actions for West African countries in relations to whistleblower and witness protection.
The exercise which is being organized by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in partnership with the LACC and the Network of National Anti-Corruption Institutions in West Africa (NACIWA), brings together various stakeholders from West African countries to discuss specific challenges in protecting reporting persons and witnesses, to raise awareness about concepts and measures used in other countries, their strength and limitations.
The regional workshop comes against the background that, despite increased awareness about the need to enact whistleblower and witness protection legislation and other measures, there is still a lack of technical knowledge on how to device such legislation, good practices and issues to be considered in devising such legislation.
Moreover, most countries have some form of general protection provided in their anti-corruption laws, but these provisions remain very vague and usually don’t provide sufficient protection for whistleblowers and witnesses.