Citizens of Opatija and members of the Rijeka academic community showed great interest in the lecture organized as part of the Opatija Coffeehouse Debates project in the premises Conference Park 25/7 in the abbey. Over 50 interested listeners last Wednesday, July 10, in a crowded hall, accompanied an excellent lecture and participated in an intensive and quality discussion, which lasted over an hour and a half together, and showed how the domestic audience is excellent at expert discussions in English.
Emanuela Ceva, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Pavia and the University of Geneva, opened the lecture dBy defining whistleblowing as the act of an individual, an employee of an institution or organization, who, through access to confidential information, notices some illegal or immoral practice that appears in the institution, and (desiring to correct it, and not motivated by profit or revenge) acts to inform others about this practice. Whistleblowing can thus be both internal (if the illegal or immoral practice is reported within the institution, competent authorities or colleagues) and external (if the practice is reported to other institutions or organisations, such as the police or the judiciary, or to the general public and the media). It is important to notice, Ceva points out, that whistleblowing is different from bell-ringing, which is an accidental practice in which someone from the outside, who is not an employee of an institution (e.g. an investigative journalist or a political activist), draws the attention of the public or other institutions to illegal or immoral practices that occur.
The main issue that Ceva deals with is related to the duty of whistleblowing – as Whistleblowers often suffer very serious consequences (such as a prison sentence for Maning or a lifetime exile for Snowden), it is questionable whether we can expect and demand such behavior from employees of any institution. It may be good or commendable, but it's too demanding to look for him as an officialt. Ceva agrees with this idea, but turns the story around claiming that whistleblowing is primarily the duty of institutions, not individuals.
Namely, she believes that institutions have a duty to provide procedures and models through which errors that inevitably occur in institutions can be corrected. One such procedure is whistleblowing.
That's why, according to Ceva, institutions have a duty to create conditions that will encourage their employees or members to whistleblow, or at least not actively demotivate them against whistleblowing. We can talk about the individual duty of whistleblowing only when there are institutional conditions for safe whistleblowing, i.e. when institutions work well and try to eliminate mistakes in their work. This, of course, does not mean that whistleblowing in poorly regulated and heavily corrupt systems is bad, but only that it is too demanding (in such bad circumstances) to consider whistleblowing (and accepting bad consequences for the individual – the whistleblower) as an individual’s duty.
The entire lecture, along with a long discussion, was recorded and is available here.
Organizers from the Association “Cultural Front”, Amadria Park Hotel Opatija and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka thanked all participants and announced the beginning of the summer break in the implementation of the project that will last until autumn.
*Report taken from official website of the “Coffeehouse Debates Abbey” project
