No matter which country, wherever the whistleblowing takes place, the words of whistleblowers are identical in terms of retaliation. Everyone has experienced this fact in their own way: the future appears grim after their professional career came to an end because as in most of the cases, the business world turned its back on those who dared to tell the truth. The justice is slow whilst files are kept waiting and the opponents ostracize the personality of the whistleblower. The citizens find themselves powerless, financially crippled and an extremely large majority of families are in great distress. The same techniques are used in countries that claim to be developed and which proclaim to be democracies. Everything is done to both ostracize the whistleblowers and to minimize the visibility of their alert. However times change, attitudes change and these past years many are the ones who joined the Resistants facing a system where everybody gets chewed up.

I have often wondered whether, like me, the other whistleblowers had in mind President Kennedy’s quote when they decided to blow the whistle, to alert:

Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

President John F. Kennedy

Switzerland defines itself as a neutral country where it would be pleasant to live and work, offering a higher standard of living than the majority of the European countries. Each citizen facing the justice testifies how difficult it is to be heard and respected. Foreigners take a different look at the Confederation when citizens from whatever field of activity confront the justice. From the outside, one could expect a justice supporting the ‘neutral’ citizens, in the image of the country. It is nothing of the sort. Even when it involves cases as sensitive as those relating to the products of the food processing industry for babies and infants, whistleblowers are not more protected than the ones working in the finance industry. This is rather shocking when we know that the headquarters of numerous sensitive companies such as pharmaceutical, food, chemical activities are located in Switzerland. Even the numerous NGOs and foundations which have their headquarters in Switzerland turn their backs on the whistleblowers.

Since 2015, Yasmine Motarjemi, Corporate Food Safety Manager at Nestlé from 2000 to 2010 spent a lot of her time explaining to me that in Switzerland, where my former employer UBS has its headquarters, nobody is really interested in the fate of the whistleblowers except a few activists. Not a single law exists to protect the women and men disclosing malfunctions. Not even an