Back in 2015, we noted that there was a global move to strengthen laws governing trade secrets. Enhanced protection was something that was included in the mercifully dead TPP agreement, and may well crop up again in the bilateral trade deals that the US administration says it now wants to pursue in TPP‘s stead. One of the many problems with enhanced trade secret protection is that it can make whistleblowing more risky, since companies might try to claim that their right to preserve embarrassing secrets outweighs any public interest in revealing their dubious activities.

That was such a concern when the EU passed a new law protecting trade secrets last year that a group in the European Parliament drafted their own proposal for codifying whistleblower protection in the EU in order to highlight the issue. As well as this general concern about the status of whistleblowing in the EU, there are more immediate problems at the national level in Germany, as this post on the EDRi site explains: