Blueprint wins TrustLaw Award for Mexican whistleblowing work

(L-R) Marco Portillo Diaz from Ritch, Mueller y Nicolau, S.C and Blueprint’s Bruno Galizzi accept TrustLaw’s Powered by Pro Bono Award for 2023.

Blueprint for Free Speech has been honoured with the Powered by Pro Bono Award at the 12th Annual TrustLaw Awards, an event that recognises significant uses of pro-bono legal assistance for the public good. The award recognises Blueprint’s high-level engagement in whistleblowing policy in Mexico, and the invaluable pro-bono assistance we received from law firm Ritch, Mueller y Nicolau, S.C.

Blueprint’s work in Mexico began in November 2020 when Secretaría de la Función Pública - part of Mexico’s federal government - invited us to participate in a roundtable in order to help the government to draft and adopt whistleblower protections. Blueprint was the first international NGO to join the roundtable, which also included government representatives, academics, and locally based civil society organizations.

Strong whistleblower protections in Mexico are badly needed; the country is probably one of the most dangerous places in the world to speak out in the public interest. Moving the discussion on from requirements and recommendations to logistics and implementation is sometimes easier with a piece of draft legislation to work with. We felt that the best way of moving this roundtable process forward was to produce a Model law for further discussion.

That’s where the pro-bono assistance came in: Blueprint requested support from the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s TrustLaw programme to advise the Mexican federal government in the design of the first stand-alone draft whistleblowing legislation in the region. The team at Ritch, Mueller y Nicolau, S.C  gave us invaluable advice about how the measures we wanted to see could fit into Mexico’s legal framework, not least the rights guaranteed under the country’s constitution.

Our excellent pro-bono team also helped us craft draft legislation that incorporates a role for anonymization and encryption technology as a tool to protect whistleblowers, something that could have a significant impact on the protection of human or environmental rights in Mexico.

Progress in Mexico’s whistleblowing plans will likely have to wait until after the next set of presidential elections in 2024, but the Roundtable process and the development of the Model Law provides a solid basis for future discussions. In the meantime, we are extremely proud that our efforts, and those of Ritch, Mueller y Nicolau, S.C have been recognised by TrustLaw.