Should whistle-blowers be protected, together with the organisation that seeks to give publicity to their revelations – Wikileaks?   The upcoming trial of Bradley Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst, is a case in point.   He is charged with leaking a highly classified video of US soldiers in an Apache helicopter killing unarmed civilians in Baghdad.   The air crew is heard falsely claiming they came across a firefight, laughing over the dead, and then attacking a van trying to rescue the wounded.   Wikileaks published the video under the title Collateral Murder.   The US military establishment was hugely embarrassed.   Should Manning and Wikileaks be punished?

Whistle-blowers perform a key public service, exposing improper, immoral, abusive or wicked activities whether in war or in peacetime that are normally covered up.   It is in the wider public interest that they should have freedom and protection to do this provided of course there is judged to be a defensible public justification for the leak and not just a settling of a private grudge.

In the case of Manning, his exposure of an air strike killing several innocent civilians is clearly covered by a public interest concern.   Wikileaks has indeed since stated that it has a second military video showing one of the deadliest US air strikes in Afghanistan which killed scores of children.   The source of that too should be protected.   However, it is also alleged that he sent thousands of pages of confidential US diplomatic cables to Wikileaks.   That cannot be condoned.

Wikileaks’ revelations have also covered corruption in Kenya, financial improprieties in Iceland, and Guantanamo Bay rules for prisoners, all of which deserve to be publicly known.   However, the impact of these exposures has led to strenuous efforts by the authorities to suppress their publication, usually by seemingly innocuous administrative devices.

Mandelson’s notorious Digital Economy Bill was spun as protection for ordinary copyright holders against file-sharing, but it enables Government to block websites like Wikileaks on grounds that it infringes copyright.   The last Labour Government introduced gagging clauses into NHS contracts to prevent bad medical or social care practices being uncovered.   A common tactic of corporations embarrassed by whistleblowers is to get rid of them under cover of redundancy programmes.   A recent example was the worried accounting executive at Lehman Brothers who raised the alarm about dubious number-cruncing to the auditor Ernst & Young, but was quickly rewarded with the sack.

The protection of human rights urgently requires that whistle-blowers, and Wikileaks as their internet platform, be given statutory safeguards in the wider public interest of us all.

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