Cabinet rejects international treaty ranking

The initiative to expel foreign criminals, passed in November 2010, has put the direct democracy system to the test and called into question the precedence of the European Convention on Human Rights over Swiss law swissinfo.ch

International treaties should not be ranked according to their ‘democratic legitimacy’, the Swiss cabinet has stated in a new report. The issue of whether international law should take precedence over Swiss law has been a hot topic in Switzerland in recent years. 

The government is against creating a “hierarchy of international norms based on their democratic legitimacy,” it wrote on Friday in reply to a parliamentary question posed by the centre-right Radical Party to clarify the relationship between Swiss and international law. 

Creating a ranking for international treaties according to their importance, as is the case for Swiss law to help resolve legal conflicts, would be difficult to apply, it said. 

Any ranking of international and Swiss law would not change the fact that Switzerland would remain bound by the international treaties it has ratified, such as the European Convention on Human Rights. 

“Switzerland would no longer be viewed as a reliable partner,” the cabinet warned. 

The cabinet report is unlikely to please the conservative right Swiss People’s Party, which has launched a people’s initiative demanding that the priority of national law over international law be enshrined in the constitutionExternal link. The Radical Party originally posed this question to cabinet for clarification in 2013 in reply to this initiative. 

In recent years, in several political initiatives, the People’s Party has called into question the precedence of the European Convention on Human Rights, in particular, over Swiss law. 

For example, the initiative to expel foreign criminals, passed in November 2010, meant that the automatic deportation of foreigners who commit criminal offences would violate the principle of proportionality, enshrined in the Constitution, and the international obligations Switzerland has entered into. Parliament finally came to an agreement on implementing the controversial initiative in March 2015. But this issue has put the direct democracy system to the test.