You are invited to the online launch of EWI
Sign up for the launch event of the European Whistleblowing Institute on 1 December 2022, 4:00 pm Brussels (3:00 pm London, 10:00 am Washington DC, 10:00 pm Singapore).
EWI Founder & Director Dr Vigjilenca Abazi and co-founders Dr Lauren Kierans BL, Dr Dimitrios Kafteranis and Bruno Galizzi, MSc present their plans with EWI.
Minutes
Seconds
Days
Hours
Register your online front-row seat in EWI.
Any questions? Let us know at:
info@ewi.legal
RSVP for the launch of EWI
You are invited to join the launch of the European Whistleblowing Institute, during our online launch December 1 2022.
Professor Kate Kenny
Professor Wim Vandekerckhove
Professor Elise Muir
-
Distinguished Speaker
Kate Kenny is full Professor of Business and Society at University of Galway. She has held research fellowships at the Edmond J. Safra Lab at Harvard University and Cambridge's Judge Business School. Kate has researched whistleblowing in organisations since 2010. Along with numerous articles in peer review journals on this topic, she has published two books on whistleblowing: Whistleblowing: Toward a new theory (Harvard University Press, 2019) and The Whistleblowing Guide (Wiley Business, 2019, with Wim Vandekerckhove and Marianna Fotaki). She has written and contributed to articles in the Financial Times, the Irish Times, the Guardian and contributed to programmes on Ireland’s RTE (radio and television). Her work has been cited in the UK House of Commons, and in policy documents at EU level.
-
Distinguished Speaker
Wim Vandekerckhove is Professor of Business Ethics at EDHEC Business School in France. He holds a PhD from Ghent University. Before joining EDHEC, he held a lecturer post at Ghent University (Belgium), visiting scholarships at the University of Oslo (Norway), Griffith University (Australia), the International Anti-Corruption Academy (Austria), and was Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Greenwich (UK). Wim has provided expertise on whistleblowing to various organisations, including Council of Europe, UNODC, the International Olympic Committee, Transparency International, the UK Department of Health, and the British Standards Institute (BSI). He was the convenor for ISO37002, the international standard for whistleblowing management systems.
-
Distinguished Speaker
Elise Muir is Head of the Department for International and European Law, Head of the Institute for European Law of the KU Leuven and Visiting Professor at the College of Europe (LLM in European Legal Studies, Bruges).
She is also the principal investigator of RESHUFFLE, a project funded by a Starting Grant of the European Research Council. It reflects on the constitutional implications of the increasingly powerful role played by the European Union in the field of European fundamental rights law.
Before starting at the KU Leuven, Elise was a tenured Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law of Maastricht University and Associate Director of the Maastricht Centre for European law. She has also been a Visiting Lecturer at Sciences Po Lille, at the Kosovar Civil Society Foundation as well as at EDHEC-Espème in Lille. Elise completed a research project entitled “Taking European values more seriously: collective enforcement of EU non-economic law” in the context of the Veni programme (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research or NWO, 2013-2017) as well as a study of the horizontal effects of the EU principle of non-discrimination with the support of a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (European Commission, 2011-2013). Elise’s research programme has been awarded the 2012 Edmond Hustinx prize for science.
Dr. Vigjilenca Abazi
Dr. Lauren Kierans BL
Dr. Dimitrios Kafteranis
Bruno Galizzi, MSc
-
Co-Founder & Executive Director
Vigjilenca is an awarded legal scholar widely recognized for her expertise on whistleblowing. Vigjilenca’s legal advice on whistleblowing is sought both in European policy-making and private industry. She co-drafted the model European law on whistleblower protection for the European Parliament and was a Rapporteur for the Council of Europe. She has given numerous talks and training for companies, organizations, and public institutions, including NATO, the Academy of European Law, Navex, Association of Certified Fraud Examiners. Vigjilenca also collaborates with a wide range of civil society actors, including co-establishing the first ever Podcast fully dedicated on whistleblowing with the Whistleblower International Network. She was named an Honorary Senior Fellow at the Government Accountability Project in Washington D.C., the world’s oldest organization on whistleblowing. The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences named Dr. Abazi the recipient of its Early Career Award in 2020 acknowledging her innovative scientific contribution and policy impact in whistleblowing. Dr Abazi is a tenured Assistant Professor of European law at Maastricht University. Previously, Dr. Abazi was a Fellow at Yale Law School – Information Society Project, Emile Noel Fellow at NYU School of Law, and Fulbright Scholar at Columbia Law School.
-
Co-Founder & Director of Education
Dr. Lauren Kierans BL is a barrister and Lecturer in Law at Maynooth University where she lectures on Whistleblowing Law at undergraduate level, as well as delivering a Professional Certificate on Whistleblowing Law, Practice and Policy. She was awarded her PhD on the Irish Protected Disclosures Act 2014 in June 2019. She has published articles and book chapters on protected disclosures and co-authored the Annotated Statute on the Protected Disclosures Act 2014. She has also produced country reports on protected disclosures and spoken on this topic at various conferences, CPD events, round-table panel discussions, and legislative briefings at both national and international level. Lauren was awarded the governmental project for the drafting of the protected disclosures procedures guidance for public bodies on behalf of the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform. Lauren is the founder of the Irish Whistleblowing Law Society and an associate with Transparency International Ireland’s Integrity at Work programme, which provides training to organisations on whistleblowing/protected disclosures. Lauren’s monograph ‘Whistleblowing and the Protected Disclosures Act in Ireland: Law, Rights and Policy’ is due to be published in 2023 by Clarus Press.
-
Co-Founder & Director of Research
Dimitrios is an Assistant Professor of Law at Coventry University. He has studied English Language and Literature and then Law. He holds a Master of Arts in International Studies and an LLM in European Economic and Financial Criminal Law. He completed his PhD at the University of Luxembourg on the legal protection of whistle-blowers in the EU banking and financial sector. He worked at the Court of Justice of the European Union prior to joining Coventry University.
-
Co-Founder & Director of Policy
Bruno is a Policy Advisor on digital regulation at the UK Government. Previously, he worked at a number of leading NGOs on free speech in Europe and Latin America. He is experienced in policy research and campaigning on issues of freedom of expression and human rights, has extensive research experience with both qualitative and quantitative methods. As the recipient of the Chevening Award, he conducted his Master Studies at LSE on social and public policy. In his master thesis, he examined the role of trust in whistleblowing through empirical research.
The European Whistleblowing Institute stems from a deep belief that there is an enormous societal gain if we become better at organising for truth.
Whistleblowers are the ones in organisations who speak up. They are the ones who are trying to guard our interests as a society in addressing wrongdoing and who aim to inform the public when abuse of power happens. In Europe, we are still defining the codes of conduct to talk about whistleblowers. EWI helps to set the stage for that.
Amplifying whistleblowing thinking, insights and ideas.
EWI builds expertise and capacities across Europe. Our aim is to become the leading institute in Europe for advancing whistleblower empowerment, acceptance, and safeguarding. We will achieve this by focussing on the three pillars of education, research, and policy advice.
We are a unique institute where insights from different fields are combined, where creative ideas can be explored, where we can pierce public-private divides in knowledge and have organisations benefit from the latest state of the art research based on data. On top of that the institute is a place where research can benefit from direct access to all relevant stakeholders.
Our goal is to establish a legal profession in Europe in this field. Very soon, every organisation with 50 employees and above, will need a ‘whistleblower officer’. We aim to assist professionals and organisations to build their capacity to meet this new challenge.
Dr. Vigjilenca Abazi
“We help build the European legal profession in whistleblowing.”
After almost a decade of working on whistleblowing – as an academic, policy advisor, and lawyer – I’ve seen different angles to what we get right and what we get wrong in law. EWI comes from a passion to advance the legal profession and education to meet the challenge of the complexities whistleblowing in our times bring about.