KUALA LUMPUR: The Whistleblower Protection Act 2010 will not protect whistleblowers if the information exposed is classified under the Official Secrets Act (OSA), said a lawyer.
Bar Council National Young Lawyers Committee chairman Syahredzan Johan said Section 6 of the Act did not state that a whistleblower was protected from OSA or any other laws.
"This is a weakness and will impact a whistleblower especially civil servants who wanted to report wrongdoings in the government administration," he said at a question and answer session entitled 'Whistleblowers should be protected' organised by the Integrity Institute of Malaysia (IIM) here.
Also present at the session were IIM president and chief executive officer Dr Anis Yusal Yusoff, Key Performance Indicator (KPI) officer Datuk Paul Low, Shuhairoz Mohamed Shukeri and the Prime Minister's Department Legal Affairs Division principal assistant director Akhzailina Md Akhir.
"This means a whistleblower is not entitled to receive protection for any exposure of documents which have been classified as official secret. The whistleblower is only protected if the information revealed is not classified as secret under OSA or any other laws," said Syahredzan.
Shuhairoz said a whistleblower need not expose documents classified as secret under OSA or any other laws as the person only had to report the matter to the authorities on any wrongdoings by their employers or superiors.
"However, the whistleblower cannot remove files or documents as only the appointed enforcement agency could do so," she said.
Akhzailina said from 2010 to 2015, there were 55,287 complaints received from whistleblowers under the Whistleblower Protection Act and from the total, 12,527 complaints were received last year.
"The tip-offs involved the wrongdoings of civil servants and private sector employees and to date only 396 whistleblowers were eligible for protection under the act," she said.
She said other complaints could not be accepted for various reasons among them false statements, doubts on sources and information or the information was categorised as petty as well as whistleblowers who did not adhere to all conditions under the act," she said. - Bernama
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