Academics call for laws to protect whistle-blowers after HKU reveals policy of revealing complainants
Expert says disclosing a complainant’s identity would be ‘really bad practice’
A group of university academics has set up a concern group to lobby the government to set up laws to protect whistle-blowers.
This came after the latest controversy over the University of Hong Kong’s handling of an academic scandal, which revealed that the university’s policy says the identity of the whistle-blower shall be disclosed to the accused parties, raising concerns over retaliation.
An expert in whistle-blowing practices said disclosing a complainant’s identity would be “really bad practice”.
In the scandal, a former assistant professor in the department of chemistry accused his then-supervisor, Professor Yang Dan, and two of Yang’s doctoral students, of falsifying research results in a paper published in an authoritative international journal, Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The complainant, Professor Roger Wong Hoi-fung, said he received an email of dismissal from Yang in February last year, two months after he made the complaint. He said he then complained to the university about the dismissal and the university in May decided to retract the termination of his contract.
But he resigned two months later, saying he wanted to show that his complaint was not about his personal interest.
Yang said she had given Wong notice of termination in December 2014 before he made the complaint. HKU has not responded to a request for comment on the dismissal.
