Belize’s Whistleblower Bill Has Sat Unfinished for Five Years

Speaking up about corruption in Belize can cost someone their job, their safety, or their home. Five years after government first drafted a whistleblower protection bill, the legislation still hasn’t passed, and a new legal review says even the current draft doesn’t go far enough to protect the people it’s meant to shield.

Prime Minister John Briceño addressed accountability broadly at an event earlier this month. “When we see these mistakes, we don’t hide it. We don’t put it under the rug. We fix it,” he said. “Because you put us to work for you. You are our bosses.”

But without a whistleblower law on the books, Belizeans who report wrongdoing still have no legal protection if they do.

Public Service Union President Dean Flowers says the push for whistleblower protections goes back much further than the 2021 draft. According to Flowers, the call for legislation first emerged in 2012 under the Barrow administration, tied to a good governance motion that had been part of the union’s 2009 collective bargaining proposals. It took until 2020 for the Briceño administration to commit to actually drafting the bill.

Belize is far from alone in this gap. Across the 56-member Commonwealth, fewer than half have passed dedicated whistleblower protection laws. Within CARICOM, only a small number of countries, Jamaica among them, have followed through with protected disclosures legislation.

The stakes of leaving whistleblowers unprotected aren’t hypothetical. Attorney Richard “Dickie” Bradley pointed to the 2013 Immigration Department scandal, which led to public calls for the removal of then-Minister of State Edmond Castro, as a cautionary tale. The whistleblower in that case, Alvarine Burgess, went public on News Five after coming from Independence Village in southern Belize. According to Bradley, she ultimately had to flee the country.

More recently, leaked documents exposing gaps in oversight of Ministry of Defense payments through the Smart Stream system have kept the Briceño administration under scrutiny, with ministries still trading blame over who’s responsible. A whistleblower could help answer the outstanding questions, but with no whistleblower law in place, and no sitting Ombudsman since late 2025, former Ombudsman Major Gilbert Swaso says fear is winning out over accountability.

“Fear is defeating integrity,” Swaso said. He noted that government is likely the largest employer in the country, which he says compounds the problem. “Because of the fact that there’s a culture of fear, and fear is defeating integrity, several people are afraid to do the right thing.”

After the bill was drafted, both the Public Service Union and the Belize Chamber of Commerce and Industry reviewed it and flagged serious gaps, particularly around protection from retaliation and confidentiality safeguards.

BCCI Chief Policy Analyst Reyhan Rosado said the draft offers only limited protection for whistleblowers and their families compared to international standards, and doesn’t include any kind of reward system, something she said effective whistleblower laws typically build in as an incentive.

Specific concerns raised about the current bill include: anonymous reports aren’t fully protected, there’s no financial reward mechanism, no physical safety protections, limited channels for reporting, no independent whistleblower agency, and no reverse burden of proof, meaning the legal standard doesn’t shift to protect the whistleblower once retaliation is alleged.

Belize does already have accountability institutions, including the Integrity Commission, but supporters of reform argue that oversight bodies alone aren’t enough. What’s missing, they say, is a dedicated system built specifically to receive whistleblower reports and protect the people who file them.

Bradley connected the whistleblower issue to a broader concern: political influence over public service hiring. He argues the Constitution assigns that authority to the Public Service Commission, not politicians, and that when political appointments override that process, it creates the conditions for corruption to flourish. “If we continue as a young country to allow politicians to give their supporters these important jobs, Belize is on the way to become a failed state,” Bradley said, warning that politicians and public servants could end up colluding to waste or steal public resources.

The proposed amendments call for several major additions: an independent protection agency, police protection measures, rewards for recovered funds, anonymous reporting channels, protection extended to whistleblowers’ families, stronger penalties for retaliation, and faster relief for victims.

Attorney General Anthony Sylvestre confirmed that some of these recommendations have already reached government but remain under review. “The unions and other stakeholders and social partners have raised that as an issue,” Sylvestre said. “As to that live issue, no final determination has been made, but certainly it is something that has been brought to government’s attention.”