One of the positive examples is the case of Tomislav Veljković, from Rača, a Serbian border town with Bosnia, one of the most famous whistle-blowers in the country, who was fired in 2006 for reporting the municipality embezzlement worth 600,000 Euros.

Soon after, thanks to rightful implementation of the Whistle-blowers Protection Act, he got his job at the municipality administration back. Referring to the ouster, Veljkovic said it was a political revenge because he had pointed out at corruption and crime.

However, in some other cases, the Act did not protect the whistle-blowers. A woman lost her job in a dog sheltter, another whistler had his car set ablaze, while a professor who reported corruption was moved to the position of night guard in the school he worked in as a lecturer.

Serbia hasn’t had separate acts regulating the protection of whistle-blowers for many years. Instead, a number of vague and ambiguous provisions were scattered across different regulations, including the Rulebook for the Protection of a Person who Reports Corruption adopted by Serbia’s Anti-Corruption Agency. However, the Agency, not being a legislative body, did not have much room for manoeuvre to introduce appropriate protection methods in the Rulebook.

As of June 2015, the Whistle-blowers Protection Act went into practice making it easier for people to break the silence when witnessing corruption or other crimes.

Experts say the problem is not in the law itself, but in its implementation where the prosecutor’s office is the weakest link.

"Really good thing about this regulation is the fact that courts protect the whistle-blowers and do that in the shortest possible time. What’s wrong is the retribution against those who dare to report the wrongdoings and prosecutors who do not react timely and thus enable the revenge to continue,” said Vladimir Radovanovic from Pistaljka website.