The Left

Chelsea Manning is a former US Army intelligence analyst, and was sent to Iraq in 2009 where she had access to classified information that was described as deeply troubling, including videos that showed unarmed Iraqi civilians being shot at and killed. 

She also gained access to war logs about the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, as well as private cables from the US State Department.

As a whistleblower, Manning passed much of the information onto the press, and the fallout from those revelations provoked international outrage. Manning was later arrested and in 2013, she was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking classified information, but was granted clemency by Barack Obama in 2017.

As the first non-profit investigative journalism  centre in the German-speaking countries, Correctiv and its network has been lauded for bringing to light the ‘cum-ex’ scandal, which is estimated to have cost EU taxpayers at least €55 billion. Using independent journalism to uncover injustices and abuse of power through thorough investigations with established media outlets, Correctiv led the way in exposing the Europe-wide, stock-trading scam by bankers, brokers, hedge funds, international tax firms, investment companies, lawyers and insurance companies.

As an award-winning journalist specialising in state surveillance, Greenwald’s work has been published in The Guardian and Salon, and he is one of the co-founding editors of The Intercept. In 2013, Greenwald was one of the reporters on a Pulitzer Prize-winning series in the Guardian on Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the National Security Agency.

He has also authored books on the Bush administration’s executive power and foreign policy abuses. As a former lawyer, he has written extensively on America’s two-tiered justice system.

As one of the ‘Bupa 7’ who expose widespread abuse in British elderly care homes, Chubb founded the charity Compassion In Care in 2000 to document other abuses in care homes, but also to support other whistleblowers. She has been a tireless campaigner for whistleblower  protection – the so-called ‘Edna’s Law’. Chubb also helped set up a helpline for whistleblowers and is a co-founder of The Whistler, whose aim is to help whistleblowers from all sectors.

This former Colombian national police colonel spent a decade investigating the extrajudicial killings of thousands of men and women at the hands of the country’s police forces, army and the government. Together with the University of Santo Tomás, Rojas Bolaños uncovered the practise of ‘Los falsos positivos’, in which thousands of innocent people were murdered and/or kidnapped in order to ‘improve’ the country’s statistics in the war against the FARC rebels. His exposé showed how horrific human rights violations were covered up and even involved changing official documents – all as part of a propaganda campaign to sway public opinion on the war with FARC. 

After receiving death threats, he is currently living in exile.

Novartis whistleblowers played a crucial role in revealing the wrongdoings of their employer, eventually leading to a $347 million out-of-court settlement in the US for foreign bribery activities by the company and its subsidiaries involving state officials, doctors, research institutes and other actors. As part of the agreement, and based on the whistleblowers’ revelations, of how the Greek subsidiary concealed those bribes by falsifying their books and records, Novartis Hellas agreed to pay $310 million of the above-mentioned settlement for its illegal activities.