Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Ragi, and today we're talking about whistleblower protections.

My guest is Leah Ambler. Leah is a lawyer and the director of corruption prevention of the Australian

Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity in Sydney.

She joined the ACLEI this past July after 12 years as a legal analyst at the OECD in Paris.

During that time, she was also co-chair of the IBA's Anti-Corruption Committee.

For our purposes today, Leah is joining us in her personal capacity as the co-author of an article

on whistleblower

protections in a very useful book that came out in 2021, The Transnationalization of Anti-Corruption

Law. Leah, thank you for joining me. Thanks, Alexandra. It's a pleasure to join me. You refer to

whistleblower protection. I think we also call it reporting protection, but we'll probably

revert to whistleblower as the next frontier in the transnationalization of anti-corruption laws.

Why don't you start by telling us what you mean by that? This article was initially proposed as a

paper for a conference at the American Society of International Law organized

on the topic of the transnationalization of anti-corruption law. So along with my wonderful

former colleague, Clelejeje, we thought about what we'd seen in the context of our work at the OECD.

At that point in time, I'd spent a large part of my career analyzing national laws implementing

international anti-corruption obligations.

And there was a near universal adoption of legislation criminalising the various corruption

offenses. The next challenge that countries were facing having adopted these laws was to enforce

them. And obviously the key to enforcing corruption offenses is detection. Our next thought was whistleblowers,

one of the greatest sources of information for companies or organisations when it comes to

wrongdoing, including corruption. They can tell you things that you would never otherwise find out.

...