The South PacificBoard

OWL recommends voting  FOR  the at-vote resolution, "Repeal 'Whistleblower Protection Act'". The Delegate has been asked to cast their vote accordingly.

Please find below the Office's Analysis for an examination of the resolution and the reasons for the final recommendation.

The at-vote resolution "Repeal 'Whistleblower Protection Act'" seeks to strike GA#539 from the pages of international legislation. While the proposal recognises the need for a WA resolution on the topic of whistleblower protection, it claims that the target's provisions are too intrusive in some and too restrictive in other areas, and that it should be replaced by a more adequate resolution.
The deficiencies pointed out by the proposal are accurate and explained in an easy-to-understand manner; especially the more complicated issue demonstrated in point 3, a legal requirement in order to prosecute whistleblowers/media outlets which is impossible to achieve due to time constellations, is untangled well by the authors. We also find the first point of the proposal particularly serious ‒ where the target resolution likely had high-ranking officials such as ministers in mind, it likewise opens up every lowly local bureaucrat's financial information to be published without possibility of legal retaliation, effectively assuming every civil servant guilty of financial misconduct without any proof needed. We wholeheartedly agree that this is utterly unacceptable.
Point 2, while appearing similarly outrageous at first, seems less serious to us, since "private" crimes can still be normally reported on without necessarily making use of the (still possibly innocent!) accused's personal information ‒ mostly, such information does not contribute much to the case at hand, and instead plays into medieval legal beliefs of public shaming. Nonetheless, this is only a proposal to repeal on these grounds, not to itself make legislation to those ends, and as such we see little harm in supporting what is otherwise a well-argued proposal to strike a flawed resolution from the books.

Thus, OWL recommends to vote FOR the at-vote resolution, "Repeal 'Whistleblower Protection Act'".