persecution Archives

The Swiss “Beobachter” magazine reported in 2022 that since the introduction of the new Swiss Code of Criminal Procedure on January 1, 2011, about 90% of all criminal proceedings in Switzerland are now handled without a court trial through penalty orders. In 2023, the Beobachter awarded the prize for the “sloppiest penalty order of the year” to the Limmattal/Albis public prosecutor’s office.

The Beobachter reported on several problems resulting from the new Swiss Code of Criminal Procedure. At least 20% of the penalty orders are withdrawn after initial release. On March 7, 2022, the Beobachter headlined: “We are looking for the worst order of the year 2022 – join in!”

At a glance, it is clear in which direction criminal proceedings, which are now only conducted by public prosecutors without judicial assessment, must go.

Swiss Prosecutor’s Offices with High Error Rate — Prosecutors: Much Ado About Nothing

Therefore, the outcry of the Beobachter, about 11 years after the introduction of the new Code of Criminal Procedure, is not surprising: The inherent problem of the new penalty system would have been foreseeable from the beginning.

In January 2023, the Beobachter named the “sloppiest penalty order” of the year 2022. A jury of three experts assembled by the Beobachter concluded that the Limmattal/Albis public prosecutor’s office of the canton of Zurich would be worthy of this negative award, due to a case that the Beobachter reported on April 1, 2022: “Two days in prison because the public prosecutor’s office was sloppy.”

The idea for this prize is based on the story of a man who spent 75 days in Swiss custody without knowing why: “The great power of the prosecutors.”

However, the Beobachter failed in their attempt to personally present the award to the head of the Limmattal/Albis public prosecutor’s office. In the report of January 26, 2023, “The Beobachter crowns the sloppiest penalty order of the year,” Lukas Lippert noted: “The reception was as frosty as the day. That prosecutor’s office refused on January 26 to accept the negative award for the worst order of the year. Beobachter editor-in-chief Dominique Strebel could not personally hand over the trophy.”

It is regrettable that the Beobachter is now almost the only editorial medium in Switzerland that still critically scrutinizes the police and judiciary. With the possible exception of the state-run Swiss television, all others conveniently look away. The mainstream journalists of the major publishing houses pick the raisins out of the cake of world events. They diligently leave the journalistic bone work in the uncomfortable environment of abuses of power by the state, the police, and the judiciary to whoever. As if there had never been human rights violations in Switzerland!
In the Swiss Canton of Zurich, at least the Justice Commission of the Zurich Cantonal Council is now investigating the issue of abusive penalty orders. The question ist, whether that is enough.

Translated by GPT-4

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SMALL SWITZERLAND: GAPS IN THE MEDIA COVERAGE

In most of its scandals,

Switzerland proves to be too small,
and its elite too tightly interconnected (due to Switzerland’s small size, everyone is practically on top of each other),

for its media to report independently and objectively. At best, one receives politically tinted reports and reports that blatantly reveal who is good friends with whom. Switzerland is simply too small to be independent in its media reporting.

Swiss Media Landscape: Manageable Political Blocks

The Swiss media landscape is neatly divided into political blocks, with the bourgeois block having the far greatest media reach.

Most media are thoroughly entangled with politics and the economy, and with their particular interests.

This division of the media into political blocks should at least ensure that the different political currents of the country are balanced. One would think that for every scandal, there would be a publication interested in reporting it from the perspective of their political masters. But this is not the case. Switzerland is simply too small: there are too few editorially independent media that would cover everything that is objectively considered a scandal in an independent and neutral manner. Too many Swiss media report selectively and distort reality according to the agenda of their paymasters. And too often, this agenda is a bourgeois one. In these editorial offices, reports about grievances, which at least people with a social value attitude would consider grievances, simply do not fit. Such reports are not of interest. Much more interesting are reports that reflect the vain interests of the bourgeoisie. The same phenomenon occurs, in the opposite direction of course, in the few Swiss media with a left-wing profile.

Coverage of Public Interest through Media Diversity

In a large country with a colorful, diverse media landscape, there would surely be a paper for every politically colored scandal. Right-wing papers are interested in the scandals of the Left and vice versa, the papers of the Left in the scandals of the Rich. Thus, the media landscapes of Western countries once comprehensively covered the public interest with reports from various political viewpoints. In Switzerland, this coverage does not work because the Swiss media landscape is one-sidedly right-leaning and reports in a one-sidedly right-leaning filtered manner. The few remaining editorially independent and left-leaning media lack the capacity to counterbalance the one-sidedness of the Swiss media landscape due to their marginalization. Therefore, reports that would be standard for publication in other countries are often overlooked in Swiss media.

Gaps in the Spectrum

Firstly, Swiss media houses fail to fully cover the political spectrum. Almost all of them revel in the bourgeois, right-wing corner. Secondly, reports on matters that do not clearly align with the agenda of a Swiss media house stand no chance of being published. If neither distinctly bourgeois nor distinctly left-wing media pick up a story, it simply falls through the gaps in the spectrum of Swiss media coverage. And no one is interested. Because no one cares. Why should they?

The Primitive Relationship of Switzerland to the ECHR

Switzerland has signed and ratified the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). So far, so good? However, Switzerland has not signed the Additional Protocol to the ECHR that provides effective protection against discrimination. In this regard, Switzerland is in the “good company” of France and the United Kingdom, which also have not signed this protocol. As a result, the scope of discrimination protection under the ECHR for Switzerland is limited to the articles of the ECHR itself. This means that cases of discrimination related to Swiss federal law, cantonal, or municipal laws—which account for the majority of discrimination cases—cannot be brought before the European Court of Human Rights. What would officially be considered a violation of human rights in the sense of discrimination in any civilized European country, cannot, regrettably, be considered “isolated cases” in Switzerland. Rather, discriminatory denials of rights and abuses of law, to name just two examples from the arsenal of discrimination, are commonplace in Switzerland. If the Swiss can afford outright discrimination hunts on minorities, considered regressive in every civilized culture, then we should not hesitate to call Swiss culture primitive by name.