Position dated 6 September 2026. Status: In force. Instrument: Zakon o zaštiti zviždača (Whistleblower Protection Act), Official Gazette of Montenegro 114/2026, register number 2010, published 3 August 2026 and in force since 4 August 2026 under its Article 46. Adopted by the Assembly on 29 July 2026 (EPA 1074 XXVIII) and promulgated on 31 July 2026. The Act's own footnote records that it transposes Directive (EU) 2019/1937.
Most of the companies we work with in Montenegro are small. A development company with a handful of staff, a rental operator, a family hotel, a services d.o.o. built around one or two founders — the sort of business that reads "EU whistleblowing rules" and reasonably concludes the topic belongs to somebody else. Under the Directive that instinct was right: its internal-channel obligation is aimed at entities with fifty or more workers. Montenegro did not copy that number. It wrote twenty, and it gave everyone ninety days from 4 August to be ready.
What the text says
Article 16 is the provision to read first, because it decides whether the rest of the Act is your problem.
Article 16(1) says an employer with fewer than twenty employees may designate an impartial person or organisational unit to receive and handle reports. Article 16(2) says an employer with at least twenty employees is obliged to designate one. That is the whole threshold, and it is unqualified: the Act's own definition of poslodavac in Article 6(7) covers a public authority, a company, another legal person and a sole trader, so a preduzetnik who crosses twenty is inside.
Two further duties attach to the same employers. Article 16(5) requires the information about the designated person or unit, and about how to use the internal channels, to be easily accessible both in the workplace and by publication on the employer's own website. Article 16(10) requires the employer to adopt an internal act setting out how reports are handled. Article 16(8) forbids the employer from influencing how that person or unit does its work.
The clocks are short and they are enforced. Article 17(1) gives seven days to acknowledge receipt of a report and forty-five days to tell the reporter what was done and how it ended. Article 17(4) requires the employer to act on an anonymous report that describes an irregularity, and forbids taking any step to identify who sent it. Article 36 requires an annual report to the Anti-Corruption Agency by 31 March each year for the preceding year.
| Element | Article | What it requires |
|---|---|---|
| Designation duty | 16(2) | Mandatory at 20 or more employees |
| Optional below that | 16(1) | Under 20 employees, discretionary |
| Publication | 16(5) | Workplace and the employer's website |
| Internal act | 16(10) | Employer must adopt one |
| Acknowledge a report | 17(1) | 7 days |
| Report on outcome | 17(1) | 45 days |
| Anonymous reports | 17(4) | Must be acted on; no tracing |
| Annual report to the Agency | 36 | By 31 March |
| Deadline to comply | 42, 43 | 90 days from entry into force |
Articles 42 and 43 carry the transitional duty: employers under Article 16(1) and (2) must designate the person or unit, and adopt the internal act, within ninety days of entry into force. The Act prints no calendar date. On our count from 4 August 2026 the ninetieth day is 2 November 2026; if the count is taken from the day of entry into force itself rather than the day after, it is 1 November. Either way the window closes at the start of November.
Two provisions will interest anyone who has drafted an employment pack. Article 8, in its final paragraph, states that provisions of a general or individual act of the employer prohibiting the making of a report have no legal effect. Article 16(12) extends the same logic to any "agreement, policy, form or condition of employment, including pre-dispute arbitration agreements", and to any other document relating to the employer, "regardless of which party adopts it".
What the text does not say
It does not define how the twenty are counted. There is no full-time-equivalent rule, nothing on fixed-term or seasonal staff, and nothing on whether people supplied through another company count towards the number. In a country whose tourism employers swing between a winter core and a summer payroll, that is not a small gap, and we cannot close it from this text.
It also does not, today, do what the Directive does for small entities in regulated sectors. Article 16(3) would require an employer with fewer than fifty staff to establish internal channels where the EU acts listed in Parts I.B and II of the Annex to the Directive apply to it — financial services and anti-money-laundering being the obvious cases. Article 44 defers that paragraph to the date of Montenegro's accession to the European Union, along with several other EU-facing limbs. So the duty that bites now is the domestic one in Article 16(2), and a small licensed firm should not assume the sectoral limb is already running.
Finally, we have not read the Annex list itself, the repealed whistleblower chapter of the anti-corruption act, or the Constitutional Court decision U-I 28/24 that the gazette record attaches to this law. Those would tell you what changed against the old regime; this note tells you what the new text requires.
Our reading
Treat the ninety days as a documentation deadline rather than a systems project. What Articles 16, 42 and 43 actually demand of a twenty-person company is a named impartial person or unit, an internal act describing how a report is received and followed up, and a page on the website saying who that is and how to reach them. Nothing in the Act requires software, an external hotline or a third-party provider.
The provision we would put in front of a board, though, is Article 31. If the whistleblower makes it probable that they reported and that they suffered harm, the burden shifts: the defendant must prove that the harmful act was not causally connected to the report. Read that alongside Article 26, whose catalogue of prohibited detriment runs to twenty-seven items and includes a negative performance rating, non-renewal of a fixed-term contract, withdrawal of work tools, termination of a services or business-cooperation contract, blacklisting, discrimination and mobbing. An ordinary, defensible personnel decision taken after a report will have to be evidenced as such — which is an argument for writing down reasons at the time, not later. Article 29 adds that the case is heard as urgent, at the basic court, with no mediation step required first.
Then there is Article 34, which we have not seen discussed anywhere and which is payable by the employer rather than the state. Where a report produced public revenue or the employer's own revenue that would not have arisen without it, the whistleblower is entitled to a reward from the employer that realised the revenue, and Article 34(5) fixes the band: not less than 3% and not more than 5% of the revenue realised or the property confiscated. Article 35 gives the employer thirty days to decide on a written request and a payment deadline of no more than six months, with the decision final and open to administrative dispute. If you are structuring a Montenegrin operating company, our company formation page sets out how we work through the compliance chain around it.
What did not change
This is a new act, not an amendment to labour law, and it does not alter the grounds on which employment may be terminated or the ordinary rules of the Zakon o radu. It does not make every dispute a whistleblowing case: Article 25 conditions protection on the reporter having had reasonable grounds to believe the information was true when they reported, and Article 11 makes it an offence to report information the reporter knew to be untrue. Employers below twenty keep a discretion under Article 16(1) rather than an obligation. The anti-corruption regime otherwise stands; only Article 5, Chapter III on whistleblowers and Article 104 of the Zakon o sprečavanju korupcije (54/24 and 41/26) fall away under Article 45, and reports already in progress finish under the old provisions by Article 41.
How to verify
Open the act at sluzbenilist.me/propisi/396669 — "Službeni list Crne Gore" 114/2026 of 3 August 2026, register number 2010 — and page through the gazette's own typeset sheets. Article 16 sits on the sixth page of seventeen; the threshold sentence to look for is "poslodavac koji ima najmanje 20 zaposlenih dužan je da odredi nepristrasno lice". The transitional ninety days are in Articles 42 and 43 on the sixteenth and seventeenth pages, and Article 46 confirms entry into force on the day after publication.
For the comparison, the Directive is on EUR-Lex at eur-lex.europa.eu: Article 8(3) reads "Paragraph 1 shall apply to legal entities in the private sector with 50 or more workers", and Article 8(4) removes that threshold for entities covered by the acts in Parts I.B and II of the Annex — the same carve-out Montenegro wrote into Article 16(3) and then deferred. We follow this file under Legal Updates.
