Britain and the United States have centuries of uninterrupted liberal-democratic traditions that celebrate individual autonomy and tolerate disobedience in the name of the greater good. Yet especially in former totalitarian police states where neighbors were pressed to tattle to the authorities on one another’s activities, whistle-blowing has negative connotations of snitching. A 2013 Transparency International report on whistle-blowing in Europe included the original words for whistle-blower in countries across Europe, almost all of which were negative. One early translation into Czech was a word meaning “informer”; a group called the Endowment Fund Against Corruption pushed instead for a word that translates as “notifier.” The original Spanish word denunciante—one who denounces—similarly hints at betrayal.

Both Germany and France, two of the European Union’s most powerful member states, initially opposed the new EU law. Germany, for instance, was among the European countries without a whistle-blower-protection law, in part because both the Nazis and the Stasi had celebrated and paid informers. During the discussions leading up to the new EU law, the transparency advocate Pam Bartlett Quintanilla says, German representatives who valued employee loyalty were obsessed with what they called the “escalation principle.” They wanted would-be whistle-blowers to keep complaints inside the organization and to go externally only as a last resort, she says.

France’s concerns were different. It already had a strong national law, and worried that a mandate from Brussels imposing a new conception of whistle-blowing would undermine what had already been accomplished in France.

Read more: The problem with the whistle-blower system

Yet just four years later, both France and Germany were on board, and the EU directive passed with unanimous support. What changed from 2015 to 2019 is that the depth and breadth of globalized elite corruption became impossible to ignore. The murders of investigative journalists in Malta and Slovakia catalyzed a movement in which transparency advocates and trade unions joined forces, bringing the new EU law into being.

In Slovakia, the violent silencing of the journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée triggered massive public demonstrations that brought down the country’s government earlier this year. In Malta, where the investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was murdered in 2017 by a car bomb detonated by a cellphone, the status quo was more resistant to change. An EU member only since 2004, Malta is small and perfectly situated geographically between North Africa and Europe to serve as the hub of an international corruption network involving smuggling, money laundering, and passport fabrication. It is legal in Malta to buy citizenship, which then allows the Maltese passport bearer to roam Europe freely. Galizia was a formidable figure in Malta; she used information from the Panama Papers in her investigations to link the government to tax-avoidance and money-laundering schemes. Immediately before her death, she had been investigating Malta’s citizenship-for-sale program. Russians in particular were buying Maltese passports. While this was legal under Maltese law, she suspected that something was amiss in the arrangement. Her murder only fanned the belief that she was correct. Still unsolved, the crime helped convince people that the EU needed stronger anti-corruption laws.