Den nya visselblåsarlagen : En arbetsrättslig studie om en arbetstagares skydd vid visselblåsning - ett utökat skydd för visselblåsare?

In 2019 the European Union presented a new directive, Directive (EU) 2019/1937 of the European Parliament and the council of 23 October 2019 on the protection of persons who report breaches of Union law. An EU-directive needs to be implemented into the national law of every member state, which for Sweden resulted in a new law regarding whistle-blowing: Law (2021:819) about protection for persons reporting misconduct, or in Swedish, Lag (2021:819) om skydd för personer som rapporterar om missförhållanden. The directive is a minimum directive, which means that all of its content needs to be implemented into national law, but there is no stopping member states from giving further protection than the directive. This paper aims to analyse the new Swedish law, how it differs from the directive and earlier Swedish law regarding whistleblowing, how it interacts with other Swedish regulations and most importantly if and how the new law strengthens the protection of whistleblowers. Our focus will be on the perspective of the employee and what the new law can mean for them, along with discussing differences in protection between the public and private sector. In order to fulfil our purpose we will in our legal investigation first present some background information surrounding whistleblowing to create an understanding of the concept and its importance. Then we will follow the legal hierarchy and firstly present information surrounding international and EU-law, then present relevant Swedish regulations that are of importance to whistleblowing. Furthermore there will be a presentation of both the old Swedish law regarding whistleblowing and the new Swedish law and how it is based off of the directive. During the legal investigation some case law, both from the European Court of Human Rights and the Swedish court, will be presented to explain some background to the origin of the EU-directive and to analyse if and how the new Swedish law could be of help in the Swedish case. Finally there will be an analysis based on our legal investigation where we answer and discuss our research question.