Kiriakou Greek whistleblower law
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The commission traces back to Kiriakou's 2012 arrest. The Greek ambassador called him at the time and asked what could be done to help; Kiriakou asked for Greek citizenship, and, bypassing the normal three-year naturalization process he otherwise would have qualified for anyway, it was granted immediately, both to Kiriakou and, subsequently, to all five of his children. Kiriakou describes himself as regarded as something of a national hero in Greece, a status he attributes to being seen as a Greek-American CIA officer who blew the whistle. John Kiriakou says the Greek government subsequently hired him to write a new whistleblower protection law, prompting five trips to Greece in 2015. He and his collaborators presented the draft to the European Parliament in Brussels, where Kiriakou testified twice; the European Parliament passed it, and the Greek Parliament subsequently passed it as well, making it law across the entire European Union.

What the old law did, and what the new one changed

Kiriakou's account of the drafting explains why a replacement was needed at all. Greece already had a whistleblower statute, but it reached only banking, and it required the whistleblower to have physically witnessed the act, to have been in the room and seen with their own eyes an official taking a bribe or laundering money. Written that narrowly, he says, nobody was ever prosecuted under it: it was "so restrictive as to be not worth the paper it was written on."

He worked through Blueprint for Free Speech, an Australian think tank that supplies governments with model whistleblower language and had by then seen such laws passed in places as varied as Canada, Zambia and Ethiopia. Kiriakou's contribution was the introduction, he had a working relationship with the Syriza government and believed he could get a meeting with the justice minister, and a draft built on the internationally recognised definition of whistleblowing: bringing to light evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, or threats to public health or public safety. The Greeks then amended and rearranged it, in his phrase, to "really make it Greek."

Two structural provisions mattered most to him. The first was a guarantee against retribution, on the reasoning that a protection only works if potential whistleblowers know and believe it exists. The second was procedural, and addressed a gap he considered more fundamental: Greece had no inspector general system, which left an official who saw wrongdoing with nowhere to report it except the public prosecutor, a step most people will not take. The draft therefore called for creating an inspector general in every ministry and department, and for allowing employees to report anonymously. What the government had not appreciated, in his telling, was that it needed a new law at all: "They thought well, we have a law on the books. That's good enough. And it wasn't good enough."

Across the rest of Europe he describes the picture as uneven rather than progressive by default: Greece, the Czech Republic and Ireland he counts among the forward countries, while Germany, "one of the most progressive countries on the continent", has, on his account, no whistleblower protections at all and actively prosecutes some private-sector whistleblowers.

First use in court

Kiriakou says the law's first real test came when a whistleblower exposed Greece's minister of defense for taking bribes from Siemens, a major domestic scandal that also marked the first time the new law was actually invoked in a Greek courtroom.

Aftermath: a private equity fund

The press coverage of the whistleblower law and the Siemens case made Kiriakou visible enough in Greece that a consortium of the country's four wealthiest families formed a private equity fund and asked him to run it, a role Kiriakou says he had held since that August.

Who commissioned it, and what became of it

The commission came from Blueprint for Free Speech, the Australian NGO that drafts whistleblower legislation and markets it to governments. "They hired me in 2015 to help the Greek government write a new whistleblower protection law. We wrote it in 2015; it was finally passed into law in 2018."

Its afterlife was larger than Greece. "Then a version of it was adopted by the European Parliament for implementation in the European Union", the instrument now known as the EU whistleblower directive, which Kiriakou concedes is imperfect after passing through the amendments and approvals of many member states. He places the Greek work in a sequence of comparable efforts by the same organisation in Canada, Zambia, Jamaica and Ukraine.

See also

- Greek Intelligence Service
- Whistleblower Protection Act
- John Kiriakou
