2023: A Year In Review
By Juliana Schifferes
Now that 2023 has ended we want to propose a virtual toast to the whistleblowers, everyday heroes and staff who made justice possible as we look back on last year.
1. Changing The Legal Landscape: Government Accountability Project’s Policy Successes
This year we were able to advance whistleblower protection standards both domestically and internationally. In North Carolina we won our legal challenge to the law that criminalized the filming or videotaping of agricultural and other corporate processes. This challenge involved employees concerned about such problems as abuse of animals raised for food production, adulterated meat processing for the food marketplace, or dangerous quality assurance breakdowns that could impact worker or public safety. The federal court at the district and appellate levels declared the law unconstitutional.
Internationally, our leadership at the Conference set up to help implement the United Nations Convention Against Corruption over the last two years led to last week’s resolution for what countries need to do to protect people who report corruption to authorities. In a momentous decision the largest anti-corruption conference ever assembled–consisting of 2000 government representatives from 160 nations, plus 900 attendees from anti-corruption non-government organizations–adopted the resolution that we developed with the Serbian government. This major achievement will now set the international...
On Friday, April 10, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) has agreed to pay just over $17 million to resolve allegations that ...