Racism in Switzerland

Articleissues
OR = July 2008

Swiss people voted a new parliament in 2007, giving the right-wing Swiss People's Party a stronger grip on power.

UN Human Rights are fearful of the alleged xenophobia that some say exists in Switzerland, and condemned laws that target the country's immigrants as unjust and racist. The Swiss People's Party, which has the largest number of seats in the Swiss parliament and is a member of the country's coalition government, drew worldwide condemnation with an ad campaign depicting three white sheep kicking a black sheep off a Swiss flag. The poster is, according to the United Nations, a sinister symbol of the rise of a new racism and xenophobia in the heart of one of the world's oldest independent democracies.

According to Pascal Sciarini, a professor of political science at the University of Geneva, the People's Party's recent electoral success is down to its tough line on foreigners, and it is now a prisoner of this strategy: "They have to keep the fires burning, and that means they have to come up with new ideas and at the same time harden their stance," he said. Other experts assert that the Swiss People's Party is only responding to the statistical behavior of recently arrived immigrants and their children in a rational way rather than acting in an agressive or racist manner.

Although Switzerland has Europe's toughest naturalisation laws - foreigners must live for 12 years in a Swiss community before they can apply, and being born in Switzerland brings no right to citizenship - the Swiss People's Party passed a new naturalisation procedure in 2007, called " Democratic Naturalisation ". In this new procedure foreigners must often be approved by the entire voting community, in a secret ballot, or a show of hands.

A report from Switzerland's Federal Commission on Racial Discrimination into the new process of naturalisation says the current system is discriminatory and in many respects racist, and recommends far-reaching changes. It criticises the practice of allowing members of a community to vote on an individual's citizenship application. Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and people from the Balkans, Africa, Asia and Latin America are the most likely to be rejected, the report points out. It cites the case of a disabled man originally from Kosovo. Although fulfilling all the legal criteria, his application for citizenship was rejected by his community on the grounds that his disability made him a burden on taxpayers, and that he was Muslim. The Swiss People's Party argues that Swiss communities have a democratic right to decide who can or cannot be Swiss. In addition, the report said "Official statements and political campaigns that present immigrants from the EU in a favourable light and immigrants from elsewhere in a bad light must stop", according to the Swiss Federal Statistics Office in 2006, 85.5 percent of the foreign residents in Switzerland are European [http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/fr/index/themen/01/07/blank/data/01.html] .

The United Nations special rapporteur on racism, Doudou Diène, has observed that Switzerland suffers from racism, discrimination and xenophobia. The UN envoy explained that although the Swiss authorities recognised the existence of racism and xenophobia, they did not view the problem as being serious. Diène pointed out that representatives of minority communities said they experienced serious racism and discrimination. [http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/front/UN_envoy_calls_racism_in_Switzerland_a_reality.html?siteSect=105&sid=6382785&cKey=1137401626000&ty=st] [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6992670.stm] [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6980766.stm]

More than half of the Swiss population are xenophobic and two thirds want foreigners to be better integrated, according to a survey published in June 2006 which measures the development of xenophobic and rightwing extremist attitudes. This first type of data, which was not uncontroversial, tends to support observations made by anti-racist institutions, as well as outside observers. [http://www.humanrights.ch/home/en/Switzerland/Policy/Racism/Studies/idart_4552-content.html]