Spain: Legally compliant whistleblowing in your company - country update in Spain

Spain finally transposed the Whistleblowing Directive by Law 2/2023 of 20 February on the protection of persons reporting breaches of the law and the fight against corruption. The law will enter into force on 13 March 2023.

The deadline set by the European Commission for member states to transpose the directive originally expired on 17 December 2021. Like most other Member States, Spain had not transposed the Directive by the deadline. In order to implement the Directive, a working group of the Ministry of Justice started drafting legislation in mid-2020. However, the resulting preliminary draft was not approved by the Council of Ministers of the Spanish government until 4 March 2022, after which a formal draft law was sent to Parliament in September 2022. On 22 December 2022, the Parliament approved the draft and forwarded it to the Senate, where it was approved 9 February 2023. However, due to amendments, a referral back to the Parliament was still necessary. At that moment, on 15 February 2023, the European Commission announced that it would take Spain and seven other countries to the Court of Justice of the EU (ECJ) because the countries had not fully transposed the directive and had not communicated the transposition measures. Spain now pre-empted this step by adopting the law.