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.

Mordechai Vanunu is a former nuclear technician at Israel’s nuclear plant near Dimona. He spent 18 years in prison in Israel, 11 of which in solitary confinement, for revealing details of the country’s nuclear arsenal to the British newspaper, The Sunday Times, in 1986. He was abducted by Israeli secret service (Mossad) agents in Italy in 1986 and secretly taken to Israel. Ten years after serving his sentence, he continues to live under severe restrictions which prevent him from leaving Israel, and ban him from entering a consulate or embassy or coming with 500 meters of international borders, border passages, harbours or airports; and require him to seek permission before contacting foreign nationals. His current restrictions are due for renewal in May 2014. In 2010 Vanunu was awarded the Carl von Ossietzky Medal awarded by the International League for Human Rights (ILHR) to individuals or groups for their defence of human rights and in the spirit of Carl von Ossietzky’s work for human rights and peace. His restrictions prevented him from receiving the prize in Germany.

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 sentence in April 2004. He was arrested the following May by plainclothes officers of the Israel security agency, Shin Bet, while working on a documentary about Vanunu, allegedly for nuclear ‘spying’. The Jerusalem district court imposed a gag order preventing f