Written by: Guillaume Bordier, Jean Gautier de la Plaine, Capstan Avocats

France has now adopted legislation to implement the EU Whistleblower Directive.

Two bills to transpose the Whistleblower Directive ((EU) No. 2019/1937 of 23 October 2019) were definitively adopted by the French Parliament on 16 February 2022 and will enter into force in the coming weeks.

The current rules

French law on the topic of whistleblowing was rationalised with the introduction of Law 2016-1691 of 9 December 2016 on ‘transparency, the fight against corruption and the modernisation of economic life’ (known as the ‘Sapin II’ law, from the name of the French Minister of the Economy at that time) and its Application Decree 2017-564 of 19 April 2017 on the procedures for collecting alerts filed by whistleblowers. This established a legal status for whistleblowers, in lieu of the scattered provisions that previously existed.

These regulations essentially established the following:

• A legal definition of the whistleblower. This is ‘a physical person who discloses or reports, in a disinterested manner and in good faith, a crime or offence, a serious and manifest violation of an international commitment regularly ratified or approved by France, of a unilateral act of an international organisation taken on the basis of such a commitment, of the law or regulations, or a serious threat or harm to the common good, of which he/she has had personal knowledge’, giving the legal scheme a very broad material...

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