Coinciding with the World Whistleblowers Day 2021, a 24-hour performance took place in Skopje on Wednesday. With the event, the Regional Anti-Corruption Initiative (RAI) called the attention of the public not only to the scale of corruption but also to the key role that citizens have in fighting corruption.
Throughout the day, by choosing to press the button and “Whistle for the End!”, the citizens of Skopje kept symbolically saving public money from ‘destruction’ in front of their eyes.
As part of the street performance, citizens of Skopje pressed the “Whistle for the End” button and thus symbolically saved 111 million denars from destruction that was happening in front of them, in a transparent box.
This is the fifth street performance brought to the streets and squares of the Western Balkans and Moldova’s capitals, as a part of the “Whistle for the end!” educational and information campaign, RAI said in a press release.
The event was opened by the EU Deputy Head of Delegation to North Macedonia, Julian Vassallo, member of the State Commission for Prevention of Corruption, Sofka Pejovska Dojchinovska, and the Senior Anti-corruption Advisor of the RAI Secretariat, Aneta Arnaudovska.
Julian Vassallo, EU Deputy Head of Delegation noted at the event: “The right to report corruption is a tool to foster transparency and integrity. And a way of protecting the common good.
That’s why it is essential to establish mechanisms for citizens to report corruption safely and to be protected from any forms of retaliation, be it legal, economic or personal. Whistle-blowers can be truly encouraged to speak out against corruption only when they really trust the institutions that receive their complaints. Only then, citizens can fully contribute to the fight against corruption”.
On behalf of the State Commission for Prevention of Corruption, Sofka Pejovska Dojchinovska, called citizens to be brave and “whistle for the end” to corruption. “First, the strongest step in preventing corruption is to refuse to participate in it, which means to choose the right direction and not become a part of illegal situations”, Pejovska Dojchinovska said.
“With the street performance, we wanted to draw attention to the damage that corruption causes to our society and to the significant role that each person has in the fight against corruption,” said Aneta Arnaudovska, Senior Anti-corruption Advisor of the RAI Secretariat.
The regional project “Breaking the Silence: Enhancing the Whistleblowing Policies and Culture in the Western Balkans and Moldova supported by the EU Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance (IPA) aims to help partners in the government and non-governmental sector of the beneficiary jurisdictions to improve the disclosure channels and protection mechanisms for whistleblowers; strengthen the capacity of civil society to support whistleblowing; and enhance the public awareness about the importance of whistleblowing in the fight against corruption.
In the framework of the project, the RAI Secretariat works to strengthen the legislative and institutional framework for the protection of whistleblowers, in line with the new EU Directive on whistleblower protection, to which the candidate countries are expected to be aligned as part of the EU acquis within the enlargement process.
