Swiss parliament approves demand for defence agreement with EU

Closer defence ties would not run counter to the law on neutrality, the parliamentarians said. Keystone-SDA

The Senate on Tuesday approved for the second time a motion from the House of Representatives that calls on the Swiss government to open negotiations with Brussels on a security and defence agreement. NATO was ultimately excluded from this demand.

+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

The European security landscape has changed profoundly since the United States government began gradually withdrawing from the European security architecture, parliamentarians in both chambers argued. They concluded that Switzerland must play its part in the rebuilding of this architecture.

By engaging in defence and security partnerships, Switzerland could undertake joint arms purchases with the European Union and adopt a security policy more focused on the European continent. Such closer ties would not run counter to the law on neutrality, the parliamentarians said.

The senators had, however, pointed out that the EU was not in itself a defence concept. Considering that NATO represented the most effective alliance in this field, they had included it in the motion.

The House of Representatives, however, had stood by its original text, which excludes NATO. On Tuesday, the Senate relented, by 21 votes to 20.

Join the debate:

Translated from French with AI/gw

How we work

We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.  

Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.

If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at [e-mail].