Please join INECE and the National Whistleblower Center for our upcoming webinar on U.S. whistleblower provisions and their transnational applications for the enforcement of environmental law.
Description
Whistleblower protections in the United States have the potential to play a large role in strengthening global environmental law enforcement. Unfortunately, the applicability of U.S. whistleblower laws to combating environmental crimes and corruption has largely been discounted or ignored in U.S. and international discourse. In particular, there is a common misconception that nothing can be done in the United States to address crimes that occur outside of the borders of our domestic legal system. On the contrary, the transnational application of these U.S. laws to protect the environment could have a transformative impact on the ways in which such crime is handled.
A 2018 report published by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that wildlife trafficking is among the top-ranked illicit trades, valued at approximately $23 billion a year, and that “the United States is one of the world’s largest trafficking markets.” The use of whistleblower rewards by the U.S. government has stimulated an unprecedented detection of crimes. These laws have resulted in a radical increase of credible reports in every field for which they have been implemented, and large rewards have been paid to foreign citizens for crimes that originated outside the United States.
This presentation will introduce whistleblower provisions in U.S laws and discuss their transnational application. Currently, none of the U.S. agencies with jurisdiction over these laws have publicized their potential application for combating wildlife trafficking, and consequently they have been radically underutilized or completely ignored by NGOs, U.S. government agencies and potential citizen whistleblowers.
About the speaker
Stephen M. Kohn serves pro bono as the Executive Director of the National Whistleblower Center. He has represented whistleblowers for over 30 years, successfully setting numerous precedents that have helped define modern whistleblower law and obtained the largest reward ever paid to an individual whistleblower ($104 million for exposing illegal offshore bank accounts), and has published numerous books on whistleblower law, including The New Whistleblower’s Handbook, the seminal guide to all things whistleblower today.
RSVP
This event is open to the public, but advanced registration is required. Materials from this INECE-NWC presentation will be made available after the webinar to anyone who pre-registers for the event. The event will take place on Tuesday, February 26 at 10 a.m. (GMT-4) online and in-person at the offices of the Environmental Law Institute at 1730 M. St NW, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20036.
REGISTER HERE no later than Friday, February 22 to attend the webinar.
