After a one-and-a-half-year delay, the act on whistleblowing (the “Whistleblowing Act”) was finally adopted in Hungary. The Whistleblowing Act will enter into force on the 60th day after its publication in the Official Gazette (most probably at the end of June). Update 24.05.2023: The Parliament adopted the new version of the Whistleblowing Act after the President requested the Parliament to reconsider some points of the original bill. The provisions of the Act regarding internal whistleblowing systems have not been changed compared to the originally adopted version. Update 06.06.2023: The Act (Act XXV of 2013) was published in the Official Gazette on May 25, 2023, i.e. it becomes effective as of July 24, 2023.
Directive 2019/1937 on the protection of persons who report breaches of Union law should have been transposed into national law by Member States until December 17, 2021. Transposition has not progressed smoothly and only 8 Member States have fulfilled their obligations by the above deadline, with several Member States still lagging behind. For this reason, the European Commission also opened infringement procedures against 8 Member States in mid-February (the eight Member States concerned by the infringement procedures: Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Hungary, Poland and Spain).
In the following, I give a short summary about the main rules on internal whistleblowing systems to be set up by employers based on the adopted Hungarian law.