They should be part of the law, but they shouldn't be relied on as the mainstay for protecting whistle-blowers, because they simply don't protect whistle-blowers. All that they do is to impose penalties on people who have caused damage to whistle-blowers. In my view, it can be valuable to have that criminalization of reprisals, but it's much more important to have clear responsibilities on people to protect, and then liability that falls on those people if they fail to deliver on those obligations to protect. Those, actually, can be quite separate and very different from any criminalization or penalization of reprisals, which tend to rely on those reprisals being either deliberate, which is actually quite rare but very hard to prove, or criminally negligent, which is also very hard to prove. It needs to be much more along the lines of normal negligence.
On April 3rd, 2017. See this statement in context.