Goran Lefkov Vladimir Bukovsky was one of the most famous whistleblowers in the former Soviet Union. His heroic deed is that in the 1970s he handed over 150-page documents to Bill Cole, a CBS News correspondent in Moscow. The documents he handed over described in detail the psychiatric torture inflicted on dissidents and communist freedom fighters by the then-Soviet KGB. The actions took place in the Psychiatric Hospital in...

Goran Lefkov The last session of the first day of the conference was full of journalists. The session was led by the professor at the Faculty of Law in Skopje, i.e. the studies in journalism, Jasna Bachovska-Nedikj. In her introductory speech she mentioned that Macedonia had several good journalists who could cope with world standards, but that in general journalists were far from the required level. She mentioned that...

Goran Lefkov Former and current whistleblowers were present at the panel on the problems and challenges of whistleblowers in Macedonia. Aleksandar Bozhinovski, founder and one of the pioneers of whistleblowing in the non-governmental sector, opened the debate by describing the closeness between whistleblowers and journalists, especially investigative journalists. As a long-time investigative journalist, he emphasized that his experience had shown that without whistleblowers almost no major journalistic research would...

Goran Lefkov The benefits of the whistleblowers’ deeds are enormous. They save both time and money and resources of law enforcement agencies. In some cases they have far-reaching benefits, as was the case with Gjorgji Lazarevski and Zvonko Kostovski. With their heroism, an entire country managed to get rid of a dictatorship. There was a similar session on the World Whistleblowers Day organized in Skopje. The Coordinator of Southeast...

Goran Lefkov In 2019 the European Union adopted a new directive on whistleblowing and whistleblowers’ protection. That directive prescribes special conditions for whistleblowers’ protection in various areas of daily life. An interesting point in this session was that more than half of the speakers in this session were people who have been through whistleblowing as a process. Some of them before the adoption of the whistleblower law in 2015,...

Goran Lefkov Center for Investigative Journalism SCOOP Macedonia and the Youth Educational Forum jointly organized the Whistleblower Day on May 12 and 13 this year. The first day a conference was held on whistleblowing and challenges for the future, while the second day the youth organized motivational speeches on whistleblowers. The conference was opened by the EU Ambassador to North Macedonia David Gere, starting with a joke on his...

Goran Lefkov Whistleblowing as a phenomenon gives a strong impetus to the fight against corruption and contributes to better democratic governance. There were forms of whistleblowing in our country in the past as well. The difference between then and now is that today whistleblowing is regulated by law. The most famous case of whistleblowing is the case of Gjorgji Lazarevski and Zvonko Kostovski. They are the people who had...