The whistleblower scheme

The school has chosen to adhere to the law’s limitations on which people can submit reports as whistleblowers. This means the following are entitled to act as whistleblowers:

• Employees (current, former or future employees)
• Volunteers
• Trainees
• Partners with whom the school cooperates, on the condition that they are either self-employed or work under the supervision and management of, for instance, suppliers
• Members of the school’s management and The School Board

Under this scheme, students are not entitled to submit reports. The reason is that the law does not provide for ensuring the anonymity and confidentiality of students who report. However, students employed in student jobs or working as volunteers at Aarhus School of Architecture are covered by the scheme.

You can submit reports anonymously. However, Aarhus School of Architecture, in general, encourages you to provide your name when submitting a report, as this makes it possible to process the case faster and with more flexibility. In cases concerning e.g. (sexual) harassment, cases cannot be processed without knowledge of the name of the victim.

There are no precise or specific criteria for which cases can give rise to a report, but it must involve serious circumstances that have occurred or are likely to occur. The following are examples of such cases (the list is not exhaustive):

• Breaches of professional secrecy
• Misuse of funds
• Theft
• Gross harassment
• Serious or repeated violations of the rules of administrative law

Violations not covered by the scheme include the following (the list is not exhaustive):

• Violations of internal guidelines, such as e.g. smoking policies or the rules regarding sickness absence

You always need to have specific knowledge or reasonable suspicion that such serious circumstances have occurred before using the whistleblower scheme.

In each individual case, the school will specifically assess whether the case falls within the scope of the whistleblower scheme.

If you submit a report, the report will be considered by the whistleblower unit of Aarhus School of Architecture. Administratively, the whistleblower unit is part of the school’s HR department.

You can submit your report anonymously without including any contact information. Aarhus School of Architecture, however, encourages you to include your name when you submit a report, as this makes it possible to process the case faster and with more flexibility.

Once your report has been received, Aarhus School of Architecture’s whistleblower unit performs an initial assessment of the case, including whether there is a need to involve other people to inform, investigate or process the case.

The school’s whistleblower unit notifies the person about whom a report has been submitted (“the person concerned”) as soon as possible. If the report falls within the scope of the scheme, the person concerned is generally notified in such a way that the report cannot be attributed to the whistleblower.

The whistleblower unit of Aarhus School of Architecture will ensure that you receive feedback on your report as soon as possible – and, as a rule, within three months after the report is received.

If your report falls outside the scope of the scheme, the School’s whistleblower unit will assess whether, based on the nature of the case, there is any basis for examining the case more closely outside the scope of the unit.

When you submit a report, you receive a receipt stating that your communication has been received. A 16-digit key code is indicated on the receipt. You can use the code to access the whistleblower portal, where you can, for instance, add more information, just as you can communicate with the school’s whistleblower unit and receive information about the processing of your report. It is also possible for the whistleblower unit to contact you through the whistleblower portal if the unit e.g. needs to ask you any questions to follow up on the processing of the report.

It is important that you continuously follow the development of the case and answer any questions from the whistleblower unit on the whistleblower portal, as this may affect the ability of the whistleblower unit to process your report.

It is also important that you keep the key code safe, as, for security reasons, it cannot be recovered if lost. If you lose your code, you will not be able to access the report on the whistleblower portal.

More information in our Whistleblower Policy.

Aarhus School of Architecture’s whistleblower scheme allows anonymous information about objectionable conditions to be submitted to a trusted whistleblower unit for further investigation. The system allows you to engage in a dialogue with the whistleblower unit in order to follow up on a case. This dialogue is also anonymous.

The whistleblower unit concerning public authorities is anchored in the school’s HR department, and your report can only be accessed by trusted caseworkers from the whistleblower unit.

If you submit information to the whistleblower scheme from a computer that is logged into the school’s network, or via the link to the digital whistleblower portal on the website of Aarhus School of Architecture, this may be recorded as part of the general logging of user activities on the school’s network. You can avoid this by entering the URL in a browser on a private or public computer that is not connected with the school’s network.

If you are uncomfortable about reporting directly to Aarhus School of Architecture or if you have any doubts as to whether your report will be considered objectively by our whistleblower unit, an alternative is to report to the Danish Data Protection Agency. The agency has an external and independent channel for whistleblowing.

Please follow this link to do so: Report at whistleblower.dk.

As a whistleblower, you are protected against retaliation by Lov nr. 1436 af 29. Juni 2021 – Lov om beskyttelse af whistleblowere (retsinformation.dk) (an act for the protection of whistleblowers)

This means, among other things, that your identity and other information in your report will be treated confidentially and that, pertaining to a whistleblower report, no access to documents or access in accordance with the GDPR rules can be granted.

This protection only applies to reports which the school’s whistleblower unit considers as falling within the scope of the scheme. This means that the protection does not apply to reports made by persons not covered by the scheme or to reports about conditions that fall outside the scope of the scheme.

In connection with our processing of your data, the General Data Protection Regulation provides you with several rights. You, for instance, have the right to request insight into what information regarding you we are processing. In some cases, you also have the right to request incorrect information to be corrected, the right to request that information is deleted, and the right to request that the whistleblower unit restricts its processing of your information.

To exercise your rights, you must disclose and verify your identity to allow the whistleblower unit to identify your information and ensure that the information is not sent to the wrong recipients.

See our Privacy Policy for more information.